Edo, the card-linked local offers platform which just closed its $15 million Series C round this past fall, is today introducing a new service for local merchants, which it’s calling the “edo Marketplace.” The company had previously announced its intention to go after the SMB market at the time of its recent raise, noting that it now plans to scale through partnerships with merchant acquirers, mobile payment providers, and media publishers. Alongside today’s marketplace launch, edo is also making good on those promises to partner by announcing a new agreement with 2Go Media, a Ft. Lauderdale-based company providing marketing tools for merchants and retailers. The agreement will see 2Go Media integrating edo into its iDeals Marketing Platform, which will allow its merchants to target offers to over 100 million consumers.
For those unfamiliar, edo is something of an anti-Groupon in that it doesn’t target users with deeply discounted deals in order to increase foot traffic at local businesses. Nor does it require a check-in, a punch card, a mobile app, or specialized point-of-sale hardware. Instead, the white-label service is tied to consumers’ bank cards (credit or debit), in order to track their spending behavior. This allows it to understand which offers to send to which customers. The alerts can arrive via a mobile app or SMS, and to redeem them, the customer just pays at the suggested merchant using their linked bank card.
This fall, the company reported having more than 140+ bank and financial institution partners on board, including Fifth Third and Ally Bank, as well as more than 200 local and national merchants, including Nordstrom, Target, Subway, Crate & Barrel, and Home Depot. Today, edo says it has grown to 150+ bank and financial partners, but didn’t report an increase in merchant adoption.
With the debut of the edo Marketplace, the plan is to change that by now going after smaller, local merchants, giving them a way to target potential customers using the same tools normally reserved for big-name brands and national chains. Using the new platform, these merchants will have access to targeted analytics data, including total dollar amount spent per week at competing merchants within a geographic region, a view into spending behavior for both existing customers and new customers within a specific timeframe, the merchant’s current market share, how the merchant compares to its competitors in terms of average purchase size, the percentage of customers who made a return visit post-program, how much was spent, and more.
At launch, the service will be made available in test markets of Chicago and edo home base Nashville, with a wider rollout planned for Q2 2013.
Edo, which positions itself as a more affordable alternative to Groupon and other daily deals sites, monetizes by taking a cut from the overall purchase price paid at checkout when an offer is redeemed. The rate tends to be 10% on the target basket, with the advertiser/merchant paying out both edo’s cut and the discount to the consumer. Today, the company claims that it can drive 30% return rates for new customers who come back once or twice, and 40% of those customers will return 3 or more times.
We also asked the company to disclose some details on growth, as it declined to talk about revenue or profitability, despite having now raised over $50 million in outside funding. Edo says its active card network is currently growing at 30 percent per month, and that within the next three months, it will extend 1 billion card-linked offers to consumers. Painting a picture of acceleration, the company says it took edo 4 years to reach that same level, previously.
In another, more specific, example of growth, the company noted that in the last six months, Ally Financial saw the number of deals redeemed per day double, and the number of cardholders who have opted in to receive weekly emails with new offers increase by more than 60 percent.
Edo competes with other card-linked offer providers, large and small, including Cartera Commerce, Cardlytics, Placecast, Bync, Roximity and more.
Comment