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Getting out of retail
From The Red Herring
JANUARY 6, 2000 - The consumer deal-finder sites, like Accompany, DealTime, Mercata,
and MySimon, are each effective at getting buyers excellent prices on
products. But the more I look into these companies, the more clear it
becomes that the consumer value proposition is only a small part of
these businesses.
I met the other day with Dan Ciporin, CEO
of DealTime. We were having a perfectly
pleasant conversation about how
DealTime's technology is (Dan claims)
better than MySimon, because it's more
scalable. Dan also says DealTime offers a
broader set of products. Etcetera. The
standard competitive pitch.
But when we started to talk about the
potential that DealTime has to build a
business-to-business exchange for the consumer goods value chain,
he really leaned into the conversation. The act of purchasing a product
online involves several companies: the manufacturer, the retail
storefront, the shipper, the bank, etc. Every business in the chain
competes to do business with other companies in the market. Could
DealTime use its consumer dealflow as leverage to help it become the
broker that assembles the services that make up customer orders?
Dan, who's now raising a mezzanine round, is hoping for just that.
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