Jellyfish to close $5 million funding round soon
By Vivek Puri | October 12th, 2006 at 12:31 am ET
Jellyfish.com will soon be closing $5 million Series B round of funding. Jellyfish.com, which is based out of Madison, WI, had previously secured $1 million funding mainly from angel investors.
Jellyfish is a comparison shopping service and works on the Cost-Per-Action(CPA) concept. Unlike Cost-Per-Click(CPC) advertisements, an ad publisher gets paid only when a visitor clicks on a ad on the publisher site and performs a specified action, like purchasing a product. CPA is supposed to prevent click fraud associated with CPC type ads. In recent industry news it has been charged that click fraud has become a major issue with CPC ads, which was rebutted in a report by Google. Off course Google Inc knows the risks quite well and has also been working on testing of CPA based advertising since June 2006.
The way Jellyfish utilizes CPA is that it has authorized more than 1000 stores to list products on Jellyfish. When a user searches for a product he will see 2 prices - ‘Total Store Price’ and ‘Bottomline Price’ which is ‘Total Price’ minus ‘Commission’. Whichever store offers the maximum percentage ‘Commission’ will be on the top of the search result. When the user completes the purchase, the store pays the ‘Commission’ to Jellyfish. Customers who buy the products get part of the ‘Commission’ as ‘Cash Back’ from Jellyfish. Conceptually as more and more stores list their product on Jellyfish, each of them will try to minimize ‘Bottomline Price’ and maximize ‘Commission’ to attract more customers. I don’t know whether the CPA system will result in a plethora of store owners at Jellyfish, but still it does seem like a good plan.
Next week Jellyfish will be rolling out major enhancements to its site including new homepage, UI tweaks, and making the back-end scalable. Jellyfish is also in process of setting up deals with major online media properties. I will write more about new features as and when they are rolled out.
Links:
Jellyfish
Tags: StartupSquad - Funding - Shopping - CPA - CPC
on October 27th, 2006 at 10:13 am
[…] Jellyfish.com today announced it closed it Series B round of funding, securing $5 million in a round lead by Kegonsa Capital Partners and Clyde Street Investments. I had written about this investment few days back. As part of this investment round Ralph Dillon, Managing Member of Clyde Street Investments, LLC, will join the Jellyfish Board of Directors. […]
on October 27th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
[…] If the site gains substantial adoption, the company hopes it can drive base prices down and commissions up. Vivek Puri’s excellent blog StartupSquad had a good explanation of the service and reported that the round was about to close two weeks ago. See also our comparative review of shopping review sites Retrievo, ViewScore and Wize. Jellyfish […]
on October 27th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
[…] ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????Vivek Puri?StartupSquad??????????????????????????????????????????????2?????????????????????????????????????Retrievo?ViewScore?Wize????????????????????? […]
on October 31st, 2006 at 1:53 am
[…] If the site gains substantial adoption, the company hopes it can drive base prices down and commissions up. Vivek Puri’s excellent blog StartupSquad had a good explanation of the service and reported that the round was about to close two weeks ago. See also our comparative review of shopping review sites Retrievo, ViewScore and Wize. […]
on November 2nd, 2006 at 7:50 am
[…] Related:Jellyfish to close $5 million funding round soon […]
on December 12th, 2006 at 2:13 am
[…] Coming back to the strategy side, myTriggers along with Jellyfish have been the prime voices against Google CPC based approach that always seems to be on a path to a higher priced keywords for retailers using Adwords system. Glenn thinks that Google’s dual search engine, where the regular search results drives traffic to CPC sites like Shopping.com and sponsored results send traffic to sites that pay Google, ultimately drives the cost up the merchant, which than gets passed on to the customer. Glenn claims that myTriggers differs from the traditional search engines by offering a Ad-free/Sponsor-listing-free search results. myTriggers delivers superior search results by searching product information from more than 1 million merchants, covering far more product categories than any of its competitors, and ranking the results purely on their relevancy. myTriggers takes care of its revenue by driving traffic to its merchants and sellers and taking a cut out of every item actually bought as a result of the clickthroughs. […]
on March 6th, 2007 at 10:00 am
[…] Nokia is also planning to support CPA (cost per action) based Ads. Right now the role of CPA seems to be more on the buzzword side of things than anything. Even though number of companies are trying, we have yet to see any successful CPA solution to emerge even on web where millions of transactions taking place everyday with good amount of user activity tracking information being collected. Comparing to that, deploying a CPA solution on mobile seems far from plausible. […]
on March 20th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
[…] Turn and Tumri are couple of startups working in this direction. Jellyfish has been running its CPA based shopping site for the past more than 1 year. Not sure how successful have each of them been. Tags:Share and Enjoy: […]
on April 13th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
hi nice site.