By Martin Vedris
MELBOURNE, VIC: Catch Of The Day, a stock clearance website for suppliers, has used the resources of Apple to its advantage by creating its own iPhone app that instantly alerts iPhone users to its daily special.
Catch Of The Day says it now has over 300,000 customers in its daily email database. This large database means that the online retailer is consistently selling thousands of units of supplier’s clearance and run out stock every 24 hours.
Catch Of The Day works by notifying its clients about its daily deal via a daily email. However, the sheer number of contacts can mean that some contacts receive the daily email alert a few hours after midday, when the daily special goes live on sale — which means that many customers can miss out on popular products which can sell out in hours.
By creating its own free iPhone app available for download, all customers who download the app to their iPhone receive the daily Catch Of The Day email alert instantly.
For customers, it can mean the difference between successfully buying a popular clearance item before it sells out.
For Catch Of The Day, it means that they use Apple resources to improve their business communications, and they have been surprised by the success so far.
“Within 2 days the Catch Of The Day app was in the top 30 of downloaded apps, and top 5 in the utilities category,” said Catch Of The Day managing director, Gabby Leibovich.
“The app uses push notification to send the email for free and they get the email instantly, at 12 on the dot,” he said. “It is certainly a new way of communicating with customers that we are pioneering.”
Online retailing is growing as more and more consumers seek out bargains on the Internet and this consumer behaviour is pushing Catch Of The Day to become the leading online retail website in Australia.
“We are vying for the position of Australia’s number one online department store,” said Leibovich. “And during July we were the number one visited site on a number of days.”