Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Tipser CEO Marcus Jacobsson (Part 1)

Tipser is a Swedish company that is turning affiliate marketing on its head!

Super interesting conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Tipser. 

Marcus Jacobsson: I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Tipser, a company that was started 10 years ago. Before then, I started out as an engineer and ended up in China for my first job assignment in pharmaceutical sales industry. I spent 15 years or so in the FMCG industry building up business units. After that, I felt that I had to go for entrepreneurship. That’s when I started Tipser.

Sramana Mitra: This is based in Sweden?

Marcus Jacobsson: Yes, but we have several offices in other countries. We operate in eight markets.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Tipser.

Marcus Jacobsson: Tipser is a Marketplace-as-a-Service where you could embed e-commerce functionality onto any kind of surface. It means that we help influencers, media, and marketplaces to embed e-commerce and buy buttons for their audience.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down and take us through three or four use cases.

Marcus Jacobsson: Our mission from the start was to help consumers purchase what they like when they get inspired. We are really minimizing the friction from inspiration to checkout. As a consumer browses in fashion magazines or social media, they no longer have to turn to search engines to find that product. They can just press the buy button and checkout the product. It’s high-consumer service to purchase. That’s stakeholder number one.

For media and publishers, we help them increase revenue to build an e-commerce business with a very simple plugin solution. Working with Tipser, you can launch and awaken your full e-commerce marketplace. You can make more than five times the revenues from classic advertising. 

Sramana Mitra: In that case, is that an affiliate model in which the media companies are getting paid?

Marcus Jacobsson: We turned the affiliate model upside down. With the affiliate model, you send the consumer to the product while in Tipser, we put the product where the consumer already is. Instead of the consumer clicking a blue link, we embed the buy button.

Sramana Mitra: From a business model point of view, it’s still an affiliate kind of fee model?

Marcus Jacobsson: It’s commission-based with the merchants and then we split that with the media. We pay out two-thirds to the media. The third stakeholder are the merchants. They essentially get a multiplied reach through Tipser. They are good at driving traffic and converting that traffic to their own web shop, but they are missing out on so many other consumers out there on the internet. When they upload their inventory on Tipser, they can enable sales on any type of surface from social media to marketplaces. There are no fixed fees for the merchants; it’s just a revenue share. 

Sramana Mitra: In this case, the merchant is paying an affiliate commission which is split between the media company and Tipser.

Marcus Jacobsson: Yes.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Tipser CEO Marcus Jacobsson
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