E‑commerce man­agers try­ing valiant­ly to attract cus­tomers to their web­sites can now go out to them with their wares instead, thanks to a clever new plat­form from BuyReply.

BuyRe­ply lets cus­tomers pur­chase items from e‑merchants with­out hav­ing to vis­it their web­sites. Here’s how it works – e‑commerce man­agers and e‑commerce ana­lysts are going to love it.

Cov­er­ing all bases

Let’s take the exam­ple of some­one who wants, say, a styl­ish new pair of train­ing shoes. An ad appears on TV and they see the very shoes they’re after. Enter BuyRe­ply: it sim­ply prompts the view­er with a broad­cast mes­sage accom­pa­ny­ing the ad to ‘text train­ers to 0400 100 100’ to buy the product.

The beau­ti­ful thing is that these calls to action can be deployed in all oth­er media – cat­a­logs, mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, radio, store­fronts, you name it. If it’s a point a where mer­chant might incite a pur­chase, BuyReply’s got it cov­ered. There’s no need to down­load and install an app in order for buy­ers to make use of it.

Users respond to ads in any of the media the adver­tis­er choos­es to pro­mote it Twit­ter, email, SMS, QR code, and so on. Oth­er star­tups such Chirpi­fy, Rib­bon and Sol­dsie have used social media for sell­ing e‑products; how­ev­er, BuyRe­ply is the first to cov­er all bases, allow­ing e‑commerce via text and email from offline media as well as in-stream social transactions.

An e‑commerce manager’s dream

Sit­ting between mer­chant and con­sumer, BuyRe­ply effec­tive­ly offers a one-click pur­chas­ing solu­tion on mobile or web — and it appears to have done so with­out tread­ing on Amazon’s toes with its patent­ed one-click checkout.

Cus­tomers must ver­i­fy their mobile num­ber using a six-dig­it pass­code and they must click on a link when they first sign-up to BuyRe­ply. There­after, they set up their BuyRe­ply vir­tu­al wal­lets, which resem­ble Amex’s Serve, Visa’s V.me and MasterCard’s Pay­Pass, and will be direct­ed to the merchant’s site when they make their pur­chase to fill in their details. The item will already be in their carts. Shop­pers need only do this once, at the point of ini­tial purchase

In tests, BuyRe­ply has found that its ser­vice yields engage­ment 25 times high­er than oth­er app-based tech­nolo­gies. Hav­ing just raised $1 mil­lion in seed-fund­ing, this lit­tle start­up can expect plen­ty of enquiries from very inter­est­ed e‑commerce man­agers.