Amazon recently snagged a patent for “anticipatory shipping” that is, where they ship you the goods before you even place your order (based on past purchases). Until they actually get the trucks rolling (or drones dropping) one Chicago-based startup is stepping in to make reordering a variety of products from different retailers more seamless.
Meet GimmeAnother, a mobile e-commerce app that lets shoppers save their favorite items to their smartphones and reorder them later.
GimmeAnother’s operations manager Kevin Cullum says the entire transaction should take less than 10 seconds.
The way it works is simple: partner retailers use GimmeAnother to place a ‘Save to Mobile’ button (similar to ‘Add to Cart’ buttons) on product pages or within confirmation emails. Since the app launched last December, Cullum says 14 retailers have signed on offering products ranging from gourmet food to furnace filters, cigars, coffee, and shaving razors.
GimmeAnother’s revenue model is based on transactions. The company charges retailers a 6 percent fee for orders that come through the app, not including shipping or taxes. “We currently do not charge an on-boarding fee, but we look to implement that charge in the future,” says Cullum. “For our enterprise clients, we have a different fee structure dependent on the levels of integration,” he adds.
The potentially disruptive bit is that once the consumer downloads the app, they can save their favorite products effectively creating their own mini mobile marketplace filled with their frequent buys. Unlike popular subscription boxes, refills aren’t dictated by a calendar.
If Amazon’s wide-ranging marketplace has taught us anything, it’s that convenience rules the day, and the shopping cart. Arecent Walker Sands study found that 95 percent of consumers said they had purchased from Amazon.com in the last year and 40 percent said they’d consider purchasing anything from the site, even if the price for Amazon jacked up the price for its Prime subscription service between $20-$40.
Says Cullum: “We’re constantly doing surveys across multiple industries and data that indicates strong consumer demand. For example, of 18-24 year olds who have an iPhone and order diapers/baby wipes online, 59.5 percent said they’d prefer to hit a re-order button on their iPhone, rather than going back through the retailer’s website check-out process, to get more diapers or baby wipes.”
Accenture’s Seamless Retailing survey bears this out. Forty two percent of those surveyed found purchasing with their mobile phones easy, compared to 23% in 2012.
And what of retailers’ own mobile apps? Cullum says while in-house mobile apps certainly can be beneficial to a company, GimmeAnother’s app creates a personalized virtual marketplace. “Retailers may create and use their own mobile app,” he says, “but if it still takes multiple minutes to log-in and order a product, a consumer might not be willing to do that.”