The Premity Blog

Online review site yelp.com has just introduced tools for businesses to reach out to their customers.  Our original coupon Website, CityVantage, also feature reviews.  While we weren’t looking for advertising or listing dollars from the merchants, we did get a taste of how merchants could easily be turned off from being listed on our site when negative user reviews were posted.  Since Yelp receives advertising dollars directly from the merchants listed on their site, it seems they’re looking to these new features to allow merchants an opportunity to reach out to dissatisfied and satisfied customers alike.  According to TechCrunch, Yelp is introducing the following features for merchants:

• Message customers who have reviewed their business
• See how many users have reviewed their business page
• Update business information
• Receive new review email alerts

Yelp will need to continue to try to balance the customer need for honest reviews with Yelp’s own need to demonstrate to merchants that Yelp has a real ability to move people from behind their computer monitors and into their businesses.  It will be interesting to see how the local merchant community responds to these new features.

Coupons can be great way to drive business. BoingBoing had a nice post that points to a confusing sandwich coupon from Rally’s.

Om Malik posted an item today titled “Local Ads, A Billion Dollar Biz, Some Day.” Om points his readers to another blog post from Donna Bogatin, where she discusses a presentation given at the Kelsey Group Interactive Local Media Conference 2007. Check out the comments in Om’s post for an interesting discussion on why companies working with local merchants seem to be failing lately, and why many companies trying to tap that market are unsuccessful.

I listened to an interesting interview today with Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of merchant review site, Yelp. You can listen to the interview here. Stoppelman has some interesting insights that fall in line with a lot of what we’ve learned over the past three years, specifically with regards to the difficulty in reaching out to local merchants to help them effectively advertise online.

In 2004, Premity was formed to give life to a product called CityVantage. When we started Premity, we envisioned CityVantage as an online version of the Entertainment Book, with valuable discounts to local retailers, printable from the consumer’s computer.

After building a network of merchants in three cities, a respectable user base that was printing hundreds of coupons per month, we decided that CityVantage was just not scalable enough. By not scalable enough, I mean not profitable.

We took some deep breaths, lasting several months and tried to regroup and de-stress. We took inventory of what we had built and our experience over the prior three years. We emerged with a new business model and a new interface wrapped around our original coupon printing technology.

After months of rebuilding, we now have our new business, the Premity Interactive Coupon System, designed for those companies currently working to promote and advertise retail merchants. Check out who we think would be a good fit for our system.

Our goal is to help retailers turn Web traffic into foot traffic.

Through our experience of working more than three years, abandoning our original concept and rebuilding, I now feel like we’re a startup again. Only this time around, we’ve learned some hard lessons and have a better understanding of what we need to do to build a successful company. We’ve admitted our failures, examined them and relaunched.

We’re a Restartup.