A month to the day that we reported that Visa was entering the e-commerce fold with its trial RightCliq service, here comes MasterCard one-upping them with the launch of a new online shopping mall.
The MasterCard MarketPlace is a joint venture with online personalized shopping specialist NextJump incorporating several different interactive shopping tools, promotions and access to more than 28,000 retailers. It launched today.
The new service, available to all MasterCard cardholders, uses visitor shopping habits and preferences, which are logged and tracked by NextJump, to compile consumer buying patterns. These patterns then dictate which promotions and special offers are best-suited to each particular visitor.
There are a rolling set of promotions available, which users can secure by logging into the MarketPlace and retrieving the promo codes for. Shoppers can also defer on promotions for retailers, choosing instead to be notified about similar promotions in the future or even in-store special offerings.
MasterCard asks users to choose which merchants they’d like to receive deals from, meaning shoppers have plenty of control over receiving promotions they want rather than just being the target of widespread offers from various merchants. Similar to American Express’s Daily Wish discount, the site also features an “Overwhelming Offer” at all times that offers a particular item of limited quantity for a short period of time.
For those concerned about security and safety, MasterCard has eschewed automatic enrollment in the MarketPlace to all its customers and instead requires cardholders to enroll directly on the site. Users also have significant privacy—retailers are not given names or specific contact information for those who enroll. Instead, merchants are only given access to particular shopper demographics so they can tailor their promotional offerings.
Only time will tell how effective MasterCard’s venture will be in the larger arena of e-commerce. According to several news accounts of the MarketPlace, MasterCard is claiming a pretty high conversion rate already—with one out of every 11 shoppers who receive a promotion notification clicking-through to access it. Keeping that pace up will certainly be tough once the novelty of the ‘mall’ wears off with shoppers but the success of the MarketPlace could also lead to some upgrades to competitor programs like Visa Rightcliq and similar offerings from American Express.
There are already some solid discounts and promotions on the site, including 15% from Kodak and 50% off at Sephora. You can learn more an enroll at the main site.
