LetsBuyIt Group AG

History

LetsBuyIt was founded in 1998 and quickly became the European leader in on-line Co-Buying services. It successfully enabled customers to group together to drive down the price of items through mass purchasing.

By 2000 it had become the best known online shopping and cooperative buying website in Europe. At its peak, LetsBuyIt.com was spending over £250 million in marketing and TV advertising, which promoted the company’s logo – an ant – to become instantly recognisable. The company had more than 2.5 million members and over 350 employees, with TV advertising shown across several countries. However, in 2001 at the height of the dot.com bubble, the company went into administration.
In 2007, the assets, including all domain names, a worldwide registered trademark, the ant logo, together with a highly regarded brand name, were purchased by the Group with the view to re-launch LetsBuyIt.com as a price comparison platform.

LetsBuyIt.com was re launched in 2009 in three countries – Germany, France and the UK, where it had traditionally been the most successful. The management team spent the intervening two years developing a fully automated e-commerce engine and platform, which uniquely sets apart LetsBuyIt from its competitors, and allowing the company to refresh its prices daily.
At the start of 2011, LetsBuyIt cemented an important partnership with WhiteWeb, a company formed by the founders of 888.com, the world’s most successful online gambling website. WhiteWeb provides a number of services to improve the “visibility” of, and ultimately, increase the number of daily visitors to LetsBuyIt.com.

On September 7th 2011, LetsBuyIt Group AG listed on the Open Market of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the symbol: B49.

Operations

LetsBuyIt.com is a platform providing online price comparison and social shopping services. The Company’s head office is located in France, Paris. The Company currently employs 20 people in Europe & Israel.

LetsBuyIt is currently active in France, Germany and the United Kingdom with three different website versions.

The Company currently reports in its websites over 50 million products sold by more than 1,500 different merchants. LetsBuyIt makes continuous and live updates of its product database and indexes new merchants with their products on a daily basis.

The operating activity of the website is managed by LetsBuyIt France, which develops and markets the LetsBuyIt website within its territories. The technical side of the website is managed by LetsBuyit France in conjunction with its Israeli office through a partnership with WhiteWeb, a specialist in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Internet marketing.

LetsBuyIt allows customers to purchase products at the lowest possible price by providing on its website all the actual best practices of online shopping. The aim of the Company is to become the leading shopping portal and an e-commerce online community meeting point. Indeed, distinctive features of LetsBuyIt are the social tools which give customers the opportunity to exchange opinions on their buying experiences, products etc.

Strategy

LetsBuyIt is embarking on a large scale marketing effort to become a leading price comparison website. This effort is being launched in cooperation with one of the world’s most experienced Internet marketing teams (WhiteWeb), the group that created 888.com (the world’s leading on-line gambling portal).

LetsBuyIt is ready to capitalise on the huge market potential created by the Internet. In 2009, online retail sales in Western Europe reached a value of Euro 68 billion and are projected to grow to Euro 114 billion by 2014 (Compound Annual Growth Rate, “CAGR” 2009-2014 +11%).

LetsBuyIt’s strategy is to derive revenues from three distinct streams, these being:

Affiliation: One of the main sources of revenues for LetsBuyIt comes through its affiliation relationship with the many thousands of merchants who wish to sell their products online. The merchants provide LetsBuyIt with their catalogues of products, and LetsBuyIt then aggregates all the catalogues from the different merchants so that users have a larger pool of products to choose from at the same time. Once a shopper finds the product he wants, the LetsBuyIt website gives him a list of the merchants selling it. If the user buys the product, then LetsBuyIt gets a commission on the purchase.

Direct Merchant Platform (DMP): Unique to LetsBuyIt, the company is targeting small merchants who would not normally have success on large Price Comparison sites, by offering them a solution to display their catalogue on the website for a monthly fee, regardless the number of sales or clicks they receive. LetsBuyIt offers visibility to the merchants and generates traffic to their sites. The key indicator here is the price the merchants are paying per month.

Targeted ads: LetsBuyIt displays banners on its website where publishers can advertise. Every 1,000 banners displayed, the Company gets a fee. It is called Cost per Mille Impressions (“CPM”).

Partnerships

LetsBuyIt works closely with all the major online affiliates, of which there are around 15 within Europe which manage the product catalogues for all the major online retailers in the world. The Group constantly uploads the affiliates’ catalogues and automatically categorises the products for its own websites, which are then shown to shoppers with the relevant offers and pricing. Unique to the market, this is a 24-7 fully automated process.