Ariadne
Capital, which invests in digital technology start-ups, has just closed a
£500,000 funding round for Taggstar making it the 8th company in its portfolio
and its 4th deal in 2014. Ariadne is the lead VC in Taggstar which is also
backed by Sir Stuart Rose, Rob Hersov, and Nigel Taee. UK-based Taggstar’s proposition informs an online
buying decision while creating a sense of product validation and urgency that
delivers superior shopping conversion. It allows shoppers to benefit from
social proof by seeing how many others are buying a product at the same time as
they shop, highlighting when it’s selling fast, giving them confidence to
purchase. Over
the past year, Taggstar has worked with large retailers such as Shop Direct and
Thomas Cook in addition to many other high volume consumer sites.
Taggstar
is led by Andrew Lucas, Chief Technology Officer, with 20+ years of IT
experience and the Marjorie Leonidas, Managing Director who spent 10 years in
BT Retail building the successful BT WiFi business, and is known throughout the
industry for ‘monetising WIFI’.Taggstar
uses its Trend Detection Algorithm TDA™ Engine to analyse the rate at which
items are selling fast. This is not just for the best-sellers but for
sites with over 40k products, where many hot-selling items may get lost, it
helps drive up their popularity. Taggstar provides software to report on
audience size and purchasing data in real-time, compiling and mapping data
points in a web-based dashboard helping retailers to review their uplift on
revenue on products that displayed the Taggstar messaging.
Taggstar
will now make Christmas a boom for UK retailers websites following its recent
success on Black Friday, the biggest online shopping day ever. Taggstar helped
one of UK’s biggest online retailers substantially increase customer
conversions and revenues. While many online retailers experienced website
crashes in the shopping frenzy, Taggstar delivered the required technical
support and scale to one of the largest shopping websites in the UK to deliver
300 messages per second and the ability to track 36,000 simultaneously shopping
on the retailer’s site.
Amit Pau,
Partner, Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund, commented: “Taggstar is part of
the value chain of e-commerce supporting retail platforms in delivering a
significant ROI and stronger engagement with customers. It helps build customer
loyalty in an extremely competitive space.”
Marjorie
Leonidas of Taggstar added, “The proposition is very straightforward but
extremely effective. We are all consumers and understand the power of social
proof and how popularity and scarcity can affect our buying
decisions. Our clients can see very quickly using A/B testing
methodology that they have increased conversions and revenue once they have
deployed Taggstar.”
Share