Quick Query: Jellyfish CEO Mark McGuire

PeC: What is Jellyfish.com?

McGuire: _Jellyfish offers merchants a risk-free channel to sell products. By listing on Jellyfish.com, merchants control the price of the product and the amount of profit they desire. The merchant decides on the commission it will pay Jellyfish, and that commission is only paid when a sale happens. The end result: online merchants avoid the fraud that is pervasive in a pay-per-click model of advertising. For the consumer, Jellyfish.com pays the shopper at least half of the commission the company earns from each sale. The consumer makes money with each purchase he completes through the website.

PeC: Why share commissions with the consumer?

McGuire: The underlying premise is when consumers search and shop for a product or service online, there is a tremendous amount of value being captured from those people searching and expressing their intent or interest in something. Because of the technology and the Internet, in the way advertisements and connections between buyers and sellers can be trapped now with precision, we really saw an opportunity to connect the buyer to the value of the advertising they were creating. Makes sense to pay the consumers for the value they are creating.

PeC: Is this better than the traditional search engines?

McGuire: Yes. In traditional search engines, there is an inverse relationship between retailers and consumers. That’s because the advertisers (retailers) that are paying the most to get in front of consumers on those search engines are not necessarily the best choice. They are the ones that make the search engine the most money when you click through. So, search engines drive clicks instead of sales, and the sale is really a key success measure that we wanted to focus on. On Jellyfish, the way that you get to the top of our list is either to drop your store price or to increase your commission amount on that product which, because we share back half of that commission, effectively drops the end bottom line price for the consumer. From the retailer’s perspective, because we are focused on the sale, our incentives are really aligned with that retailer. So, we move from a pay-perclick model to a cost-per-action model.

PeC: How did the company decide on the name Jellyfish?

McGuire: What it says to us and what we like about it is No. 1, it is extremely memorable. The second thing is, as we think about our underlying advertising model, a big thing that we are bringing to the market is real transparency to the end customer in terms of the value of that advertising.