If there’s one industry that hasn’t really gone social yet, it’s probably e-commerce and the general deals space. With that in mind, Reclip.It is re-imagining the social deals and couponing space, by providing its users with deals they might not have known about, before they try to buy.
In an online world, when users looked for deals, most would target a product they wanted and then tried to hunt down the best price or redeemable deal codes for that item. In contrast, Reclip.It is trying to replicate the behavior that shoppers have in the offline world, where they find something on sale and decide to buy it, instead of the other way around.
There’s plenty of evidence to show that users want more targeted deals sent their way. For one thing, 57 percent of consumers currently “like” brands on Facebook or follow them on Twitter looking for deals or special offers. And there’s 2 million moms blogging about coupons and deals, according to BlogHer. Reclip.It has been working to partner with them, and now has 450 bloggers curating deals that its users can follow.
To provide users with relevant deals, Reclip.It extracts interest data from Facebook to identify brands and products that a user might like, and then notifies them when products go on sale. Users can follow other Reclip.It users and share deals with their own followers by “reclipping” deals and claiming them. Using machine learning, it also starts to identify more relevant content based on the deals that users reclip and claim.
So far, Reclip.It’s got pretty good engagement with users: 62 percent of its users are active weekly, and spend on average about an hour and 13 minutes on the site per month, claiming two deals per visit. It’s also adding users at a pretty good clip, growing 30 percent month over month. Four months ago, during its private beta, users were clipping 1,000 deals a day. Now it’s up to 4,000 deals a day.
Reclip.It was formed out of the team that built CityPockets. The team, led by CEO Cheryl Yeoh, uprooted from New York and moved to Silicon Valley to be a part of 500 Startups’ most recent Accelerator class. The company has raised a total of $840,000 from 500 Startups, Say Media’s Ted Rheingold, and Circle of Moms’ Mike Greenfield, as well as previous investors Great Oaks VC, MI Ventures, and other angels.