clickO Deals takes a shot at Cyber Monday 2014

Mark Freidin

20th Nov 2014

New Online start up clickO Deals is taking up the challenge to bring Cyber Monday to Australia starting 28 November to 1 December.  Since 2005, Cyber Monday has been a hugely succesful event for online retailers in the USA. Cyber Monday is the Monday after Thanksgiving in the USA, and was widely promoted by shop.org, the digital arm of the US National Retail Federation to boost pre Christmas retail sales.

The New York Times in late November 2005 reported that the term Cyber Monday came about as the result of people returning to work after a refreshing break to broadband speed internet connections and snapping up deals across the web.

It Wire recently postulated “Clicko founder takes on Click Frenzy” however, online retailing veteran Mark Freidin founder of clickO Deals suggested that clickO Deals was actually created as a solution to some of the inherent weaknesses he saw in the daily deals model and the Click Frenzy model, and that he wasn’t seeking to steal Click Frenzy’s thunder. Whilst COO at Catch of the Day, Mark learned first hand about the growing inventory issues daily deals businesses have to contend with on an ongoing basis. Secondly, when Click Frenzy launched in 2012 the first thing that struck Mark, after the event was that the database was not going to be engaged regularly.

“The future of online retailing success is in marketplaces and engaged visitors” says Mark, and clickO Deals is exactly that. Its a marketplace in the most simple form. “Our base offer is $1 to participate and list up to 20 hot deals”. We suppy a virtual table and a venue where we attract crowds, and the sellers that participate on clickO Deals get to sell their wares directly to the buyers. We just faciliate the meet up of buyer and seller.” Freidin sees the benefit of creating a marketplace where all retailers big and small alike can showcase their products or even their own brands on clickO Deals. “By creating relationships with retailers we dont need to carry any stock yet we have a platform that can easily compete with any of the daily deal sites however we can scale up quickly to be the one marketplace for all retailers as we dont have to hold stock, manage stock, dropship stock or even think of stock, problem number 1 out of the way.” Freidin further suggests that clickO Deals checks every item listed, if its not “dealworthy” it will not be approved for listing, this way clickO Deals remains a lean marketplace for bargain hungry shoppers.

“In solving problem number two ie keeping a database engaged, we are about to start promoting our weekly clicko Friendly Marketplace deals each week and at the same time retailers can come to us and ask us to promote their brand and their products to our database.”

Freidin further suggests the key thing about clicKO Deals is that its technically “Open source”. Unlike other marketplaces such as eBay. “we don’t compete, as a matter of fact we welcome any of the marketplaces, deal sites as well as eBay sellers to showcase their products on clickO Deals, everyone is welcome as long as the deal is the very best. On the topic of Cyber Monday, we felt that it was a great way to introduce ourselves to the Australian marketplace gently. We have been running under the radar since June while testing the site in soft launch with brands such as Jeanswest, Bevilles, Bonds, David Lawrence, Tool HQ and a variety of other retailers with pleasing results and conversion rates as high as 19%.

US brands Macys and Bloomingdales, Sheplers and eBags are just some of the US retailers that will be hosting offfers and deals. For those US retailers that don’t ship to Australia. clickO Deals is also encouraging shoppers to sign up with Australia Post’s US Shopmate Postage Service. Freidin said that sign ups by retailers are running hot too with over 50 new retailers having signed up in the past 24 hours alone.