While watching the soccer, if I want to buy a Barcelona jersey, I have to leave the medium I’m engaged with (TV) leave my house, go find a store that stocks this product then buy it.
“While my purchase intent is at its highest while watching TV, it diminishes over time, so the sooner I can capture a transaction, the higher the chance of a sale.”
As time goes on my circumstances change, I get distracted, my financial position might not afford a jersey, my wife might talk me out of it or Barcelona might lose the game.
Before half time, I might have wanted to buy the jersey badly enough to transact on the spot but at the end of the game I no longer want to.
Had I been able to make that purchase instantly, before half time, I’d have done so.
In reality, the transaction point is not a website away (perhaps it is from Twitter) but if you take into consideration traditional marketing methods, the transaction point is miles away.
If you see something you like on TV, hear something on radio or see something in a magazine or catalogue, you still need to visit to a store.
Even if you don’t need to visit a store, there is significant friction in buying online. You need to leave the couch, find a computer, search for the product, find a size, add it to cart, enter your payment details and so forth.
The opportunity therefore lies in bringing the transaction point to the medium – Twitter being one of those mediums.
Albert describes this here:
“The primary reason behind the need to disrupt and really move you elsewhere is that most web services have not yet found or deployed their native way of making money, which is largely due to the inability to transact within the services themselves.”
It is not only web services that have not found a native way of transacting in stream. It is all offline mediums that don’t yet have a native way of transacting.
This includes television, radio, magazines, catalogues, etc. In order to transact we see something we like, then we go to a place where a transaction point can occur which is either in store or on the web, but what if the transaction could occur off the medium itself?
What if I could buy Roger Federer’s shirt off his back while I’m watching the game in real-time using native technologies on my mobile phone (by native I am referring to technologies that don’t require an App download)?
What if I could purchase when my purchase intent was at its highest via a single click payment mechanism?
This is what Albert alludes to in his last paragraph when he talks about Facebook, Apple and Amazon storing credit cards.
That’s why the platform we have created solves this problem, and I look forward to sharing more with you shortly. We enable instant transactions from any online or offline medium, including Twitter, via a secure virtual wallet.
The question remains: How will your start-up take advantage of these changes?
