SurfMerchants - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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Title: SurfMerchants
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SurfMerchants
- Jeremy Bolton
- Manka Johnson
- Santeri Leijola
- David Spivey
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Overview
- Mystery Shopping Industry
- Sassie Survey Database Application
- SurfMerchants Opportunity Strategy
- Lock-in Options and Comparisons
- Conclusions
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Mystery Shopping
- Mystery Shopping is a booming, 200 million/yr
industry - Mystery shoppers are dispersed to multiple
locations of a retail or service chain - Posing as customers, these shoppers fill out
detailed surveys to assess the location's level
of service - The Mystery Shopping company must then collect
and process mountains of data and generate
statistical reports for the retail chain
Source surfmerchants.com
4
Mystery Shopping
- Once done by faxes, manual entries and
spreadsheets, Internet-based technologies are
greatly improving efficiencies - Several aspects of Mystery Shopping have made
larger software companies avoid the industry - every survey must be laboriously customized
- no pre-made solutions exist
- the user interfaces are dauntingly complex
- reports statistics are intricate and often must
be customized for each client
Source surfmerchants.com
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The Mystery Shopping Industry
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Source surfmerchants.com
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SASSIE - Features
- Survey engine 100 customized and optimized for
mystery shopping applications - High speed SQL relational database platform (not
Lotus Notes or Manta-based) - Generates complex, up-to-the-second reports on
the fly - All surveys and reports and scoring can be
customized to the client's specifications - Handles shopper accounts and client accounts with
password security - Can import surveys from other systems easily
- Schedules shoppers based on location, past
shopper performance, and shopper demographics - Completely web based - no servers or high speed
internet connection needed
Source surfmerchants.com
8
SurfMerchants Opportunity
- Target and acquire clients
- Mid-sized clients who do 500-1500 shops per month
- Can charge a healthy 5 per-shop fee (clients
make average 42 per-shop) - These clients need software but dont do enough
business to justify self-development costs
(50,000) and maintenance - Dominate this segment (75 market share)
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Strategic Issues
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Strategic Conclusion
- Create lock-in to keep lucrative clients if/when
competitive landscape changes
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Lock-in Key Formulas
- Total Switching Costs Costs borne by customers
costs born by new supplier - Profit from current customer total switching
costs quality/ cost advantage - If no quality/ cost advantage, profit from
current customer Costs borne by customers
costs born by new supplier - Strategy Increase switching costs or
quality/cost advantage
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Lock-in Options
- Use of Contracts
- Increase perceived switching costs
- Create technological barriers
- Be a Low Cost Provider
- Product Superiority
- Value-Added Solutions by Expanding Features and
Uses
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Use of Contracts
- Value is limited with current pricing structure
- Clients wary
- There are limited resources for enforcement
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Increase perceived switching costs
- Convince customers (mom-and-pop agencies) about
the difficulty of switching (after Sassie is
implemented) - Convince customers that competitors are not as
good as they claim to be (the cable strategy)
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Create technological barriers
- Use proprietary database or data transfer formats
- Advantage short-lived, since competitors can
circumvent with new technology
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Be a Low Cost Provider
- Could start price war
- Causes SurfMerchants to forgo profit
opportunities from high margins
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Product Superiority
- Although SurfMerchants product is currently the
market leader, a relatively low capital
investment could yield a superior product - Product Specific Dependency through
customizations better lock-in
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Value-Added Solutions by Expanding Features and
Uses
- Emphasizes expertise
- Build relationships with lucrative clients
- Entrenches SurfMerchants in customers businesses
- Costly to implement
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Conclusions
20
Source surfmerchants.com
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