Kampanjjakt vs Aftonbladet: The Coupon Code Wars
When Aftonbladet launched their coupon site, the Schibsted property claimed they wanted to become the biggest discount shopping site on the market. Whilst they certainly have a lot of resources and plenty of customer pull, they’re not without competition. In Sweden alone there are dozens of prominent coupon sites, and perhaps the biggest is Kampanjjakt. With 10m in annual revenue and thousands of subscribed users, they’re well placed to challenge Aftonbladet for the “discount shopping throne”.
We caught up with CEO Kiriakos Tseneklidis for a chat about early days, their competition and the future for the company.
Tell us about Kampanjjakt
The idea of Kampanjjakt.se started at the end of the summer of 2009. I was working as a salesman during those days and I was selling different products to consumers all over Sweden. The product range was very varied: I was selling everything! One day I was proposing mobile phone deals and the other one I was trying to convince people changing their electricity providers for a better one. After a while I felt that it was really boring especially because I had to travel to different cities in Sweden just to work and miss everything else that city had to offer. In that moment I started to think what if people could come to me for the offers instead of the other way around. Keep in mind that I knew nothing about creating websites back then, and I still don’t. On top of that I had no experience at all in SEO. Still, I quit my job to follow the dream of creating my own company. Without any business plan on how exactly this would be done I started to call different companies asking them if they could give me offers that I could present to the consumers. This went better than I was expecting but the real problem was to reach the consumers. I had a very bad looking website with really good offers but nobody could find them.
So after almost 6 – 7 months of living on my savings I got my first sale on Kampanjjakt.se and made my first 500 SEK. I will never forget that first joy! It felt great and I started to believe this was possible to manage. I started to read more and more about Google and SEO and I also started to read a lot about about affiliate marketing.
I contacted Tobias Sjödin on Tradedoubler and we started to talk about the possibilities. There was one or two more discount sites out there, I found out but they were very poor and had no ambitions to become better. I had little traffic on my site but still I wanted to offer the best and user friendly website with the best offers that I could.
That became my mission and the site is evolving ever since. It’s important that Kampanjjakt.se always is in front as it has been since the start of 2009. We are pioneers in this branch in Sweden and when I look back I think that we have evolved the whole market here in Sweden together with Tradedoubler.
You’re working in a competitive market – how do you think you can be unique and stand out?
Without sounding overly cocky or disrespectful towards anyone I’d like to say that Kampanjjakt stands out in every possible way. We are always the first to evolve and take it to the next level and competitors just follow. We are a team of 6 persons working daily with kampanjjakt to be able to deliver the best discounts for the consumers and we take what we do really seriously.
We are the only discount site that has been promoted on television, Radio and print commercials on the Swedish market. Kampanjjakt have been trying alone to get the Swedish consumers to open their eyes for possibility to shop with better discounts online. These commercials have also opened the eyes of more competitors and lately more discount sites has started to pop up.
We were about 4-5 serious sites back in 2010 now we have over 100 active discount sites. You have to work hard and put down the time to keep the competition away and the quality high.
From the outside it looks much easier than it is. That’s why many discount sites are very short lived. Sadly many of these not so serious sites destroy the view of the online shops perspective on the discount sites.
What does the future hold for Kampanjjakt?
This year we been expanding and invested in 3 countries outside Sweden and will continue to do so 2014. The natural move for us now would be to merge with at big company with big media channels who see the possibilities to take this to the next level with us. We see endless possibility with the right partner on our side. Our goal is to be the first natural thought for the consumer when it comes to discounts / offers.
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