Tipser – a solution for media companies to compete with internet sales giants

Media companies are facing an almost existential threat to their survival from online shopping sites. Brands are increasingly treating social media as a sales platform. For example, Instagram launched its shopping platform last March; since then, according to Marketing Week. one brand has increased revenue by eight percent using Instagram shopping posts.

This undermines the publishers because they are losing sales from their own reader offers in the affiliate market whose turnover in Europe is forecast to reach €621 billion this year. This is because when a reader clicks a link that is embedded in the publisher’s content, it sends them to another site containing the webshop where they can place the order. This means that the publisher loses the reader traffic.

“The old model for publishers is broken,” says Marcus Jacobsson, co-founder of Tipser, an e-commerce platform for publishers. “Amazon, Facebook and Google are taking the lion’s share of advertising expenditure, leaving other media companies to fight over the scraps. These three companies are also getting better and better at attracting traffic from conventional media.”

With Tipser, readers remain on the site while the actual order is integrated into the retailer’s order system. The publisher stays in control of the traffic and enjoys a higher commission on sales. The company creates a digital store for the publisher onto which retailers can upload an inventory while the publisher selects the products that they think readers are likely to buy. The publisher pays a monthly fee for access to the Tipser toolbox to manage the web shop.

Tipser started out in 2011 when Jacobsson and his two co-founders Jonas Sjostedt and Axel Wolrath recognized a trend with bloggers and influencers beginning to change how consumers spent their money. In the last three years it has acquired 15 clients, seven out of the top ten biggest media publishers in Europe, such as Burda and Bauer in Germany and Bonnier Publications and Schibsted in Scandinavia.

As shoppers switch more and more to online shopping, an unanticipated bonus has been an opportunity to push for more environmentally friendly kinds of spending, particularly important to younger members of Tipser’s team.

Jacobsson adds: “As we help publishers with embeddable e-commerce, we are very close to reader trends and sentiments and see a huge rise in climate awareness. So we perhaps have a better opportunity to push for more environmentally-friendly consumption than some classic e-commerce players. E-bikes, for example, are one of our best selling lines.”

Lastly, the company has already moved beyond its Scandinavian roots into Poland, France and the U.K. That leaves the rest of Europe as well as the Middle East and the U.S. Asia, particularly China, looks a little less certain to Jacobsson because of very different e-commerce platforms and possible entry barriers.