What is Alice.com?

Middleton, Wis. -- At the recent In-Store Marketing Summit, among the several topics and concepts discussed was a website called Alice.com. Named after the maid on "The Brady Bunch," the site is an online store for shelf-stable items, but also sends members reminders to reorder products, checks for promotions on items and ships products for free. The online shopping tool is a shared platform for just over 180 consumer packaged goods manufacturers that bypasses retailers and connects directly with their end users. In addition, the website is a foundation for shopper insights, allowing marketers to review transaction data or test new products among Alice.com users.Mark McGuire, president and co-founder of Alice.com, says manufacturers maintain their own listings on the site, choosing SKUs and controlling pricing in a virtual supermarket of essentials, such as toothpaste, trash bags, diapers, pet products and cleaners. They don't pay to be on the online site, but Alice.com gets a flat fee for every order filled."We're essentially an advertising platform for those manufacturers," McGuire says. Alice.com has already proven to be a successful venture, though it only launched in June 2009. McGuire wouldn't disclose how many users he and co-founder/CEO Brian Wiegand have attracted, but he claims they get about 1 to 2 million unique hits a month. The site focuses on three major concepts: free shipping; pricing that is competitive to brick-and-mortar retailers by automatically finding and applying coupons; and sending reminders to reorder. For the latter, Alice tracks how often customers order particular products, then sends them e-mail reminders and puts products in a reorder queue. Customers can also reach Alice.com when they purchase items from manufacturers' sites directly. Approximately 30 of the CPGs partnering with Alice.com -- including General Mills -- have "storefronts" of their own. Visitors to a brand's site are automatically taken to an Alice.com shopping cart when they make a purchase from the online store. In general, McGuire says he encourages CPGs to get a storefront so they can spend their ad dollars getting people closer to the brand and to directly measure the impact of their marketing. Via Alice.com, CPGs can implement loyalty programs and incremental revenue opportunities, but selling product is not, perhaps, their most valuable gain. Manufacturers are given the opportunity to get closer to consumers who post comments and participate in video testimonials. According to Armen Najarian, senior director of corporate marketing at DemandTec, a predictive pricing and promotion analytics firm in San Mateo, Calif., Alice "will not be a large volume play," but it can be used to mine valuable insights."Some manufacturer might say, 'I want to test among the community of Alice users,' knowing that they represent a pool of early adopters," he says. "There is rich learning to be had by pre-releasing, for example, an item through this channel. Secondly, it's more a sustained research -- a panel, if you will -- with shoppers that are willing to engage and provide responses to one or two key questions during the checkout process. Or, you can analyze shopper behavior just like you would a bricks-and-mortar retailer -- the pool of transaction-level data, the items attached to a basket."Alice.com's McGuire says the site tracks consumers in various ways after obtaining their ZIP codes, family member count (humans and pets), and asking what products they regularly use. Personal identification information is not shared, though they do allow CPGs to see the entire site's top sellers and category leaders.CPGs are also given opportunities to pay for listings and other merchandising promotions. Many of them choose to put product samples in Alice.com's shipments, some targeted to certain buyers. "Then we follow up with a coupon," McGuire says. This allows manufacturers to know who used the coupon, what else was purchased at the moment, and how much time passed before the product was bought again. Najarian, who has posted analysis of Alice.com on his blog Brandcentric.net, says it is far from a garden variety e-commerce site. "What makes it different from every other direct-sell framework that a manufacturer might invest in is they're literally enabling a platform, and they're letting the manufacturers control the terms, the pricing and the merchandising themselves." Najarian also says the site eliminates the messiness of a CPG having to build its own site, such as the technical challenges involved, staffing and maintaining the shopping cart, and the fact that many shoppers won't go to a brand site to buy.

What is Alice.com?

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