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DiscountIF

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A different take on e-commerce, offering cashback on everyday items, based on the outcome of an event.

135%
 - 
Funded 22 Mar 2016
£150,001 target
£202,642 from 150 investors
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Business overview

Location Valletta, Malta and London, United Kingdom
Social media
Website www.discountif.com/
Sectors Advertising & Marketing Digital B2C
Company number 8484153
Incorporation date 11 Apr 2013
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Investment summary

Type Equity
Valuation (pre-money) £1.3M
Equity offered 13.94%
Tax relief

EIS

  • Idea
  • Market
  • Team
  • Updates
  • Investors 150
  • Discussion
  • Documents

Idea

Introduction

DiscountIF is a different take on social e-commerce, offering consumers cashback on every day items, based on the outcome of a sporting event. We call it “The Power of IF”. A classic example is: “Buy this Samsung 47” TV and get 100% cashback IF Chelsea win the Champions League”.

Backed and staffed by a number of ex-Betfair colleagues, DiscountIF was launched in the summer of 2014 with a low-risk strategy of “minimal investment to test and learn”. We are now ready to take the product to the next level with a fresh band of investment capital.

Intended impact

Our idea has been to take this attractive and emotive promise and build a technology and promotions platform to enable any retailer to offer promotions of this sort. Our starting point has been to prove the model with our own brand to understand customer behaviour.

Having understood how our customers engage with our platform directly, as well as the commercials behind it in terms of both converting customers and enhancing algorithm accuracy for profitability, we are now ready to scale the number of transactions that are going through the DiscountIf platform

In order to do this, we are adopting a B2B strategy whereby we offer our solution to other ecommerce brands. Our B2B reach out campaign has been positive and we’ve seen commitment for trials for Q1 2016 with sports ecommerce sites.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We've been recognised in and chosen as finalists for several innovation awards. We were recently Semi Finalists in the Start-Up category of PitchtoRich. Over 1,000 start-ups applied and we were in the Top 10 companies.

We've reached over 6 million people on twitter and we've acquired a small user base of very engaged customers. 37% of customers have bought more than one offer on our site. We've also had some early beta tests of allowing customers to create their own offers with significant conversion rates of over 30%

Monetisation strategy

We have two revenue streams for our business.
The primary one that we shall be focusing on, is our business to business revenue stream. We shall offer our promotional technology as a widget for other ecommerce sites. Every time a sale is made through our widget we shall earn a commission.

We also have a business to consumer site, which will earn us a margin that is lower than other e-tailers in the first instance. Each sale is directly linked to an offer which is similar to a direct marketing cost. Our current suppliers allow us to make low margin profits on our sales, and we believe that we can substantially increase that over time as we establish a core userbase.

Use of proceeds

Our technology has been driven by our CTO who has managed an external resource team in eastern Europe. This gives us flexibility and scalability as well as a good range of skills on which we can call.
This finance round will enable us to scale our development team in the near term, in particular rolling out our technology across other ecommerce sites. We have identified roles which will allow us to scale the technology in line with our growth expectations.

Market

Target market

Consumers
We believe there is an opportunity to engage any e-commerce consumer with an interest in sport or entertainment, which is a broad category.

Within that, there are specific audiences that we know we resonate strongly with, including a female audience who are very much underserved by “risk” brands, which are mainly dominated by betting companies. Young males with a strong correlation with the football fan and gaming audience have been early adopters. Like many discount sites however, we expect to win consumers across multiple demographics.

The intention though is to create our own segment - people who like the idea of winning cash from a sporting event, but whom would never dream of entering a betting shop or betting online. We believe this is a substantial USP, and has already caught the attention of a number of betting brands. This is a market that they have notably failed to address, with the possible exception of the Grand National weekend.

Finally we are currently restricting ourselves to the UK market, but we are conscious that the scope of this product should not be limited as such, so we will pursue other markets aggressively once we have proven increased traction in our home market. There are obvious opportunities in markets where gambling is either grey or explicitly outlawed where we could offer a non-betting form of sports-risk entertainment.

Characteristics of target market

The e-commerce market is well established and is growing at staggering rates in the UK and across Europe. In the UK the market is estimated to grow by over 16% in the 2015 with online sales of over £52bn.

We believe that at present no portal exists that offers the customer proposition that we’re outlining.

Marketing strategy

We believe our B2B campaign will bring us the ability to scale in terms of number of transactions, without having to spend top marketing dollar. We hope this will lead to an increase in immediate cash flow without the requirement to increase burn rate or effect customer acquisition costs.
We’re onboarding ecommerce partners through trials in Q1 2016 with a focus on sports ecommerce sites in the UK. We are aiming to target ecommerce sites that use platforms such as Magento, that would then enable us to approach other ecommerce sites using this technology.
We plan to scale the number of ecommerce sites by Euro 2016, which is a big sporting event starting in June 2016 with a lot of brands seeking to gain exposure and sales.
We shall utilise our B2C site as a demo site to test customer behaviour and also marketing channels that can be used by ecommerce partners that we onboard.

Competition strategy

We have already enjoyed interest and early stage trials with e-commerce brands who wish to partner with a multi-channel retail platform, and we are looking to grow that marketplace aggressively with several brands expressing interest already. This approach naturally serves us in expanding into new markets and geographies where we can rapidly grow networks of trusted local shipping partners.
Additionally we have a longer term intention to establish white-label products and APIs for brands to integrate DiscountIF into their own shopping cart solutions.

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If you successfully purchase a share lot of this business, you will be granted access.

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This campaign for DiscountIF has been approved by Seedrs Limited (trading as Republic Europe) ("Republic Europe", "us" or "we"), as of 26 November 2015 as a financial promotion. Republic Europe is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority with firm reference number 550317. In approving this campaign, Republic Europe has concluded that the information, taken as a whole, is "fair, clear and not misleading." This means that for factual statements we have reviewed evidence of their accuracy, and that for aspirational statements we believe they are phrased appropriately in light of their speculative nature. You should note that in the case of factual statements, the evidence we review is provided by the business, and we do not audit it, which means that we may not be able to identify forged or altered evidence. You should further note that in the case of aspirational statements, the nature of the type of businesses presented on the Republic Europe platform is such that they are likely to have high ambitions, and we may approve statements that convey those ambitions even where we do not believe, or we do not have a view on whether it is likely, that they will be fully realised. The pre-money valuation and investment sought in the campaign are those set by the business: they are not reviewed or established by us, and the valuation is not an independent view of what the business is worth. Given the nature and type of businesses presented on the Republic Europe platform, it is possible that the business has very little cash remaining prior to receiving this investment, and the investment sought may be necessary for the business's on-going existence.

Republic Europe does not make investment recommendations to you. No communications from Republic Europe, through this website or any other medium, should be construed as an investment recommendation. Further, nothing on this website shall be considered an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security to any person in any jurisdiction to whom or in which such offer, solicitation or sale is unlawful. Republic Europe does not provide legal, financial or tax advice of any kind. If you have any questions with respect to legal, financial or tax matters relevant to your interactions with Republic Europe, you should consult a professional adviser.

Tax Relief (SEIS)

This business is eligible for SEIS relief - providing qualifying investors with income tax relief of 50% of their investment and certain other tax reliefs. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and is subject to change in future. Click to learn more.

Tax Relief (EIS)

This business is eligible for EIS relief - providing qualifying investors with income tax relief of 30% of their investment and certain other tax reliefs. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and is subject to change in future. Click to learn more.

Valuation (pre-money)

Valuation rounded from £1,251,032

This is the fully-diluted pre-money valuation of the business (i.e. before the new investment comes in and including issued options and other equity interests). In contrast, the post-money valuation is based on inclusion of the new investment in the value.

It is calculated as the pre-money valuation plus the amount of new investment. e.g. If Company A is ascribed a pre-money valuation of £1,200,000 by prospective investors investing £300,000, its post-money valuation is £1,500,000.

The investee business is responsible for setting its own valuation, it has not been prescribed by Seedrs.

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Equity Offered

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When the amount raised is less than 100%, the equity offered is based on the target raise. Once the company has raised over 100% it is based on the total raised.

In some scenarios, entrepreneurs may accept additional direct investment after closing their Seedrs campaign. Provided this is within 6 months of the closing and on the same terms, we do not typically offer pre-emption rights on that extra investment (where you have the opportunity to invest again to maintain your percentage shareholding).

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