I’m sorry I've been away for a while, but we've been really busy and now you’ll know why...
Yesterday was a BIG day in buySAFE’s history as we officially announced the public beta launch of buySAFE Shopping Advisor – a totally new and unique desktop application that enables risk-free online shopping with two key benefits:
- Smarter and safer Internet shopping - everywhere
A Safe Shopping Rating is automatically inserted into the search results of all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and eBay) to give the user the information they need to shop smarter and safer. - An alternative risk-free shopping channel
A Safe Shopping Portal, accessible via a click on Shopping Advisor, provides alternative product choices from thousands of merchants where every purchase is automatically guaranteed with a Bond of up to $25,000 and Identity Theft protection for 30 days – at no cost to the buyer. It’s really very cool, you should try it!
The buySAFE Shopping Advisor is a totally free desktop application that plugs directly into a user’s Internet browser. It’s completely safe and secure and won’t slow down the browser as it only works after the browser has fully rendered the web page being visited. You can see a recorded press overview by clicking here or for our full press release about Shopping Advisor launch click here.
Our goal with Shopping Advisor is to create a true win-win-win for shoppers, merchants and buySAFE.
Shopping Advisor is designed to make internet shopping safer and more secure for consumers in two ways - 1) by arming them with the information they need to make smart and safe shopping decisions (Shopping Advisor assigns a Safe Shopping Rating to 300,000+ eCommerce websites in the U.S. based on an objective assessment of their use of the normal best practices that ensure a safe and secure shopping and experience) and 2) by providing access to an alternative risk-free shopping channel where every purchase via the Safe Shopping Portal is automatically guaranteed with a bond up to $25,000 per purchase and the buyer receives 30 days of free ID Theft protection (covers ID theft issues regardless of cause). All of this is FREE for the shoppers who use Shopping Advisor. Period.
Our normal bonding service for merchants is a free service (when they use our Buyers Choice pricing model) that builds trust with shoppers, helping the merchant convert more visitors to buyers. We've tested buySAFE on literally hundreds of merchant sites and across millions of transactions and have found we have a materially positive impact on website conversion – typically 4-15%, with an average of 6.8%. Our free bonding solution gives buyers an option - if they so choose - to purchase a Bond Guarantee at checkout, typically for about 3% of the purchase price to fully guarantee all the terms of sale (in other words, bonding typically runs about $30 on a $1000 purchase). Our testing shows that just giving the shopper the option to buy the bond makes them more likely to buy (whether they choose to buy the bond or not).
When using Shopping Advisor, the buyer no longer has to pay the 3% fee but rather we now automatically include the bond for free. We’ve also added 30 days of ID Theft protection for free on each purchase because we wanted to make sure we fully address the two primary concerns Internet shoppers have – merchant non-performance and identity theft. Click here to see my press video overview for more details on this topic. Merchants pay buySAFE a referral fee, but ONLY if a shopper actually makes a purchase. Pretty much every buySAFE Merchant I’ve talked to has told me they really like this concept because buySAFE is able to send them buyers that are trust motivated (vs. just cheapest price) and they pay a % of the sale price, but only if we actually generate a sale. This cost-per-sale pricing model makes it essentially a risk-free advertising solution for the merchant.
buySAFE wins because we're succeeding on fulfilling our vision of making internet shopping safer for buyers and more profitable for merchants and hopefully building successful business in the process so that we can rollout additional tools like this to make internet shopping safe.
I'd highly encourage you to download Shopping Advisor and give it a try. Click here for the Shopping Advisor download page. It's our first day after the public beta launch so I'm sure there are lots of areas for improvement but we’re working hard to make it a really powerful and valuable shopping tool. Please send us all the suggestions you have and we'll work hard to incorporate as many as we can.
Many thanks. Jeff
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