2. 1. What is Buxoff?
BuxOff is an online coupons/offers/deals platform. The site's main function is to supply online
discount offers to its consumers that cover practically every category you can think of, including
travel, electronics, apparel and lots more….
2. Why Online deals/coupon market?
48% of U.S. adult Internet users redeemed a digital coupon for shopping last year
100 million - expected number of US adults that will redeem an online coupon by end
of 2014
Retailmenot - the biggest US online coupon company with 24 Million unique monthly
visitors is currently valued at more than $1.5 Billion
Coupons.com - with 18 million unique monthly visitors is valued at $1 Billion
There are additional dozen more companies that are in this space, that have similar
operational as well as revenue models, and yet have achieved significant growth in a
short span.
3. How is Buxoff different?
While the current model of almost all of the coupon websites is to provide free coupons to its
consumers, while charging an affiliate commission from its vendors, thereby limiting the number
of companies that can promote on these websites, Buxoff will not charge any affiliate
commission on any transaction that is made on its website, thereby creating a platform that
opens up opportunities for thousands of retailers.
Additionally, in terms of technology, we believe the future of internet will revolve around
Artificial Intelligence (Ai) ,and we at Buxoff are creating Artificial intelligent (Ai) systems on the
internet that will help us solve problems at a global level.
Our DNA is to innovate and work smarter in solving problems. The first glimpse of Ai systems in
Buxoff will be visible by July 2015, when we launch “Social Mapped Search” (SmS)
4. What are the current pain points of retailers that you are addressing through Buxoff?
Our research on the functioning of coupon industry has given us some startling insights
Most of the vendors, who pay an affiliate commission, are not convinced whether they
have got additional consumers through these coupon websites.
With the existing cookie system, there is a lack of clarity as well as presence of multiple
loopholes through which coupon websites are eating into the revenues of online
retailers.
3. By providing the platform free to the retailers, Buxoff is able to relieve them of the
mentioned pain points and make Promotions easier.
5. What is your execution strategy? How do you propose to keep the platform running during the
gestation period, without revenues?
Initially, the company plans to operate entirely out of India, in order to keep its costs low.
However, in the near future, it plans to set up a base in US for client acquisition, engagement
and various other marketing activities, while retaining the technology center in India.
6. How will Buxoff operate in terms of customer engagement?
Our aim is to create a platform that enables any e- retailer, irrespective of its size, to promote its
offers and coupons online, thereby reaching out to greater set of consumers. To achieve that,
the team at Buxoff is striving to create a D-I-Y (Do it yourself) model, where in any vendor, can
create a login ID and start posting the hottest deals and coupons from his/her website.
7. What about Buxoff’s customer retention strategy?
Apart from the run of the mill marketing strategies that we would use in order to retain our
customers, we believe that the future of ecommerce is mobile! Hence, Buxoff plans to roll out
its mobile app (Android, IOS etc) for its consumers, thereby making search easy.
8. What are the initial markets that you are going to target and why?
With online retail sales expected to hit $370 billion in US, and close to 48% of US adult internet
users redeeming an online coupon, we believe it is best to concentrate on this market initially.
9. How do you propose to generate revenues?
While the platform is and will be free for vendors and consumers, Buxoff plans to generate
revenues through Advertisements
10. Where do you see Buxoff in 5 years
We as a team have a very coherent and clear vision for Buxoff, and the vision is to provide a
platform with cutting edge technology systems that will change the e-commerce landscape.
In terms of numbers, considering everything is on track, we will be able to reach out more than
50% of the ecommerce consumers help them in getting the right product, at the right price and
at the right time when they need it.
4. 11. Could you throw some light on your product roadmap and some numbers that you expect in
terms of website traffic?
We will not be able to reveal details regarding the product roadmap as it is a part of our core
strategy, but a rough projection of our traffic graph for the next year can be seen below.
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
October December March July December
SEO
Apps
Social
Direct
Others
Total
Traffic in Millions
October – 0
December 2014 – 1 Million
March 2015 – 6 Million
July 2015 – 18 million
December 2015 – 40 Million
This graph shows the share what each metric will be sharing in Traffic that is Seo , Apps , Social ,
Direct , Other sources of traffic.
The app of Buxoff will be going live in the month of March – 2015
12. Do you have any plans of working on the design/User interface of the website?
Let us give you a background on UI before sharing our roadmap for it;
The User interface for a web product depends on the layout, and once the layout is confirmed,
the aesthetic part is taken care of. The layout depends on analytics that comes from heat maps
and studying consumer behavior which we will get when we have made the website live in the
alpha and the beta stage respectively, Therefore the final User interface that we will come up
with the product launch will take some time
5. We will be planning a 5 round comprehensive testing for the design, along with taking inputs
from professional industry designers, the best output will be chosen. We believe in going right
rather than fast.
13. Do you have a social strategy planned for your product?
In the present business scenario, Social is a very important strategy. However, we believe that a
successful social strategy is not in the campaign but in the product. We do have multiple ideas
for a comprehensive social outreach, but primarily its execution will be based on the results
obtained from testing of our product which is an important frontier for our growth and reach.
14. Could you throw some light on your team / people consulting you?
We at Buxoff are a bunch of highly motivated people. Additionally, we are also very grateful for
the help received from the best minds in the industry ranging from the Google Analytics Team,
The Facebook Team for Apps, and the mobile Catalog org. We would like to thank Amazon USA
for providing us valuable feedback about the market and the problems related to the e-commerce
arena.
