So, a cool new savings tool appears on the scene and starts exploding with organic users out of the blue (over 1000 beta users already!) and of course your first question is: "Looks interesting but how is this different to Honey or Capital One"? I don't blame you. We'd ask the same thing (if we hadn't built it). It's actually an entirely new thing.
The market has moved to a personalized savings approach, and the days of big public deals are evaporating. This makes total sense, everything in 2022 is data driven including how stores run their online marketing. Checkmate is a response to how the market has moved, by
3 founders who have spent multiple years in the e-commerce space.
We spoke to dozens of online stores around USA, and what we learned is that they have shifted to using personalized-based-marketing rather than just generic 'target everyone at once' campaigns. This is why existing tools like Honey and Capital One that rely on public deals just don't work that well anymore (and honestly have become a bit spammy). Checkmate is a response to how the market has moved.
The TLDR (If you only have 1 minute):
Checkmate is a brand new concept. If you've shopped online in the last year, you'll have noticed some trends:
- Merchants sends you a personal code offering you $50 to come back and make a new sale if you haven't shopped there in a while.
- Merchants reach out with a quick automated discount if you abandon cart at checkout.
- Merchants routinely offer 15%-20% off a next purchase just to join their mailing list so they can reach out and personally incentivize you more.
- Merchants send you a deal on your birthday as an excuse to contact you and bring you back into the ecosystem.
- Your credit card company offers you 15% back on all sorts of seemingly random stores based on your previous sales. These personalized deals are targeted at you. And you should have access to all of them at the time of checkout. Merchants send thousands and thousands of deals like this per day.
Checkmate is the first tool that generates these deals for you using some secret sauce (more below) and then automatically applies the personal deals that you are being sent to you directly. No one has built that before and early users are finding crazy savings.
Most importantly: Merchants love Checkmate - because it allows them to actually market directly to users they have been increasingly struggling to reach, and consumers love it because they are saving tons of money again.
If it turns out you actually had two minutes after all:
It's not just online stores sending you deals. Your credit card company does. Your bank does. Your insurance provider does. Hell - even your car dealership sends you promotions. Existing savings apps can't touch any of this, and it turns out that this is where the big money has moved.
Let's take this up a notch.
Users want to reap the benefits of these deals, but they don't want their own inbox being spammed. So, we came up with this wild innovation. What if we found a way to tap into all of the thousands of top mailing lists and generate personal deals for users without compromising that user's security, identity or inbox, while simultaneously bringing in new customers for online stores.
So. We came up with the Ghost Box.
We generate users a new secure email on our back-end and sign it up to the top mailing lists. We then pull all those deals in and apply them for the user as they shop, allowing the online store to personally incentivize that user with *big* deals, without that user having to get spammed. It works insanely well:
Check out our savings study.
We do other cool stuff too. Our long term vision:
As if the above wasn't cool enough - We're aiming to become the centralized source of all your shopping within the next year. Checkmate also tracks your shipping packages, tracks your gift cards (and reminds you to use them at checkout!) and even finds truly exclusive deals for you from our growing list of partner merchants. To us it makes total sense that the same place you shop should be the same place you find deals and track your packages. Checkmate is aiming to become the new home of shopping within the next 24 months, and it's totally free.
Merchants love us.
One of the main problems online stores face in 2022 is bringing in new business and incentivizing repeat business. This is why stores are going so hard on personalized deal generation now, but they still have trouble getting it in front of the right consumers at the right time.
Checkmate bridges this gap.
We designed our whole system from the ground up to be as friendly to merchants as possible. We have an entire partner page on this here .