RainCheck

For example, some consumers shop online and add goods to a cart, and then seemingly abandon it without heading to a virtual checkout.

“Consumers will add products to the cart and then leave the tab open on their phone.  When they’re out shopping, they’ll flick through the open tabs to work out where to shop,” said RainCheck CEO and Co-Founder Cameron Wall.

A key challenge for retailers is understanding how online activity converts to offline sales, and using that intelligence to their advantage. “Retailers spend a lot of money on e-commerce but realistically have no idea what happens to people after they leave their websites,” Wall said.

RainCheck has spent the past year-and-a-half validating its business model, building its technology platform and raising capital. It is also one of the founding startups to be accepted into the Stone & Chalk fintech hub.

RainCheck operates in the B2B2C space, and its technology consists of an online to offline commerce platform for retailers and an app and browser extension for consumers, which enables the creation of a ‘wishlist’ that can be accessed whilst shopping.

The retail platform runs on AWS, in part because Amazon Web Services is a partner of Stone & Chalk, and also because of the advantages that it offers to startups like RainCheck.

As startups are cost-conscious, startup programs run by cloud providers like AWS are a valuable route to get started quickly. Scalability and reach is also valuable, providing a path to expand quickly into new markets to grow the business.

Wall said that having a cloud-based platform also breaks down potential barriers to adoption.

“There are three things that retailers will tell you when you try to introduce new technologies: they have no money, no time and no resources. So it’s really hard to sell a piece of software or technology into retail.”

“We built the whole RainCheck platform to run in the cloud, which means there’s no capital expenditure for the retailer.”

When a consumer is browsing an e-commerce site and finds something they like, they can hit the ‘share’ button on their phone – or hover over the item in the browser – to expose a RainCheck icon. Tapping it adds the item and all the information about it to a central wishlist.

“After adding items to my list, I continue on with my life.  But maybe four days later when I get within a couple of hundred metres of a shopping mall and I cross a geofence border I might get a single push notification.”

“When I tap on the notification, it lists all the items I’ve wishlisted that correspond to retailers in the mall. Some of them will have unique time-based offers, such as an additional 10 percent off if redeemed in the next hour or two.

“If we have a finite proximity solution like a beacon in a store, it can similarly notify me when I walk close by the door.”

Participating retailers receive contextual information about prospective customers.  Without RainCheck, the retailer has no idea if a consumer liked something online.

“We know when people are online and on a retailer’s site, what items they like, what stores they go to and when they go into those stores. All of that online to offline data is provided to the retailer in real-time.”

Retailers could also use this kind of intelligence to their advantage at sale times.

“Let’s say there’s a blue top they want to clear and it’s in 1400 consumers’ wishlists,” Wall said. “They can send a notification just to those people.”