Visual bookmarking and online curation tool Clipix today announced that it has partnered with Credit Saison, Japan’s third-largest credit card issuer, to integrate Credit Saison’s a-q-f-.com Eikyufumetsu loyalty program into its tools. With this, the more than 25 million users of this program can now use Clipix to bookmark items they want to buy from one of Saison’s partners in the future and gets points from Saison’s shopping loyalty program.
As Clipix points out, this will enable members of this loyalty program to earn points even if the items are later purchased through a member’s Clipix account. As part of this integration, Saison members can now also easily create new Clipix accounts by entering their Credit Saison credentials, and the Clipix button is getting prime real estate on the popular a-q-f.com shopping portal.
Whenever a user sees an item to bookmark in any of the roughly 500 stores featured on a-q-f.com, Clipix will automatically organize it in a new clipboard on its site. Those bookmarks will be specifically marked as coming from a-q-f.com on the site.
As Clipix CEO Oded Berkowitz told me, Japan was never Clipix’s strongest market, but thanks to a chance encounter with a Saison executive, the company managed to set up this partnership in the last few months. He does believe this is a great fit for the company, though. “We went to Japan because the Japanese culture is a private culture and as such, the privacy on Clipix fits perfectly,” he told me.
Ever since its launch in 2012, one of the features that made Clipix stand out from similar tools has been its ability to keep track of the prices of the items you bookmark and alert you when those prices drop. Clipix’s Japanese customers will be able to use this feature, too, and Berkowitz believes that this is a win-win situation for his company and Saison.
Clipix gets access to a wide range of new users and affiliate commissions (but only from users who don’t buy from an a-q-f.com store); Berkowitz says this will also open up lots of advertising opportunities for the company.
Saison, on the other hand, will be able to offer its users unique features — especially thanks to Clipix’s price alerts. Given that users who clip an item will likely return to it later and buy it, this should also create new opportunities for the shopping portal to recapture customers who may have otherwise gone elsewhere.
Looking ahead, Clipix will likely build on this launch to add new partners to its ecosystem in the coming months. Berkowitz hinted at this in our conversation, but wasn’t ready to announce any specifics. He did, however, say that the company will likely start offering stores the ability to anonymously communicate with Clipix users (who opt in to this) in the coming months. If a store sees you have bookmarked a camera from its site, for example, it could send you a coupon for a percentage off to push you to make actually make that purchase.