for giving consumers huge, one-off discounts without necessarily incentivizing them to return to businesses.
“They solve problem of customer acquisition, but not the problem of customer retention and loyalty,” he says. “The consumer is trained not to be loyal to the merchant but loyal to the deal.”
The Swipely platform offers information and analytics on shopper behavior that enables businesses to better tailor discounts to achieve their goals. For example, if a restaurant notices that a customer has only visited at lunchtime, they can offer discounts that only apply at dinnertime.
One last thing about Swipely: the company says physical credit and debit cards aren’t going to go away anytime soon. (I wonder what players like LevelUp, which allows consumers to pay using their smartphones, would have to say about that.)
“From our perspective the way people pay isn’t broken,” Davis says. “We think the problem is that the payment network doesn’t add much value to the market. We’re trying to transform that sleepy boring commodity business that is the credit card network into a valuable direct marketing platform.”
