Offertrax raises funds, launch set for August

Posted 12 July 2006 12:40pm by Chris Lake with 0 comments

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Congratulations are in order for Ron and Ben at Boston-based Offertrax, who have raised an initial round of funding to help them launch their first product in August.

The company has raised “less than $1m - for now” according to CEO Ronald Pruett, who told me that he secured the funds from “private investors from the Boston area with high tech backgrounds and understanding”.

Offertrax is a social shopping site based around RSS technologies. The founders (Ronald Pruett and Ben Carcio) hope that the service will help join up the gap between consumers and merchants, via targeted alerts delivered by RSS. “It is time to put consumers back in the driving seat,” says Ron.

Consumers can use Offertrax to anonymously track products and services, only acting when they see offers that are of sufficient interest. The company also allows users to share tracked offers with their friends, post reviews and comment on products. This social networking element is a smart move.

Offertrax is one of a number of shopping-orientated startups that have emerged over the past few months.

Crowdstorm, a UK-based social shopping startup, is headed up by Kelkoo co-founder Philip Wilkinson, who has also been speaking with a number of possible investors in recent months. He recently evangelised about RSS for marketing at our What’s New In Online Marketing event (.ppt slides here - subscriber access), and we interviewed him a few weeks ago.

See Mashable's review of Crowdstorm for more details.

If you are a retailer or other e-commerce company I’d recommend spending some time getting to know these companies, as the clever ones may soon know a good deal about consumer shopping preferences on a one-to-one level.

We’d be interested to hear from any client-side marketers who are implementing an RSS strategy. Contact to let us know how you’re doing with your RSS experiments.