Today we launched our new site where we guarantee the resale value of new products at the time of purchase. So you can own things for less.

You might want the new gear or gadget, and you know you are going to want the next new one when it comes out. Or you want to try something new, and if you use it and you want to move on, it still has value and you want to capture that value. Up until now it’s been too hard to do. Ztail is making it easy to upgrade, capture value, and buy without risk. On top of that, it’s free.

It’s time to start thinking about the cost of owning products. You pay for a new product, you use it, it still has value when you are done with it. The cost of owning is the difference between the new product price, and the resale price, we call that the “Ztail price”, it’s what you pay to own the item. If you love it and want to keep it, you are under no obligation to sell it, we are just giving you the option.

How do we do this? Ztail has been spending the last few years working on making it pushbutton easy to sell on eBay. We have also been working on pricing for used and new products of all kinds. We’ve been working hard to make it easy to think about owning things in a new way.

We all know that there are many ways to own a car: you can buy, lease, rent, or even subscribe. There are many ways to own music and DVD’s. But what about the rest of the products we own? The CEA says the average American household owns 26 types of consumer electronics. That doesn’t include other product categories, such as sporting goods, jewelry, baby goods, etc. So when are we going to think about different ways of owning those? How about now?

Ztail’s new guaranteed resale price is the 1st step towards owning everything else in a new way, a way that gives you options down the road. Don’t let that old digital camera sit in a drawer somewhere. When it’s time for a new one, get something for your old one. Ztail works with your normal purchase activity and ownership. We give you the option to move on when the time is right.

Here’s how it works. You come to Ztail and find products you want. Sign up and Ztail locks in the resale value at time of purchase for 1 year. You buy the item from a trusted online retailer, and when you are ready to sell, you come back to Ztail, and we create an eBay auction listing for you. When your product sells, if you don’t get the guaranteed resale price, we PayPal you the difference. Easy.

The best part of the guarantee is that it’s a minimum resale value. If you get more than the guaranteed resale amount. You keep it. The listing is created on your eBay account. The money you get is yours. We did this last year with the iPhone and users loved it:

“I was on the fence about selling my iPhone, and your offer made the whole thing too hard to resist. In the end I sold the phone for $350  ($120 more than your guarantee, and about $30 more than others I had seen in the week before. The process you had for making the listing was awesome — I’ve sold stuff before, and pretty much hate the listing process, so this was a great
improvement.”

So we are bringing this program to many more products, and we are giving it to you at the time of purchase. We have thousands of products with a guaranteed resale value, and we will be adding more. If you are an online retailer and want to get in the program, drop us a line.

Where is “What’s it Worth?”? We are currently redesigning our pricing guide site and will have it back in a few weeks. So it isn’t going anywhere. You will be able to use Ztail to buy new products, get a guaranteed resale value, research prices of new and used products, and sell old products you own.

Ztail makes money from referral fees from retailers when you buy products. So the program is free to you, and is a great way for retailers to offer more value to their customers. You get great products from great retailers at their normal competitive price. It’s the next step in eCommerce, it’s the next step in ownership. Try it out, we think you’ll like it.

A twitter post by my man d-rod ( yes, twitter, but I am not calling him @rodnitzky - just give me time, okay?) sparked this post. He referenced a mediapost article today called: Why Affiliate Marketers Will Win Big In 2009 — And How They Will Do It.

The article covers some great facts about the growth of Affiliate marketing:

• Affiliate marketing $6 billion+ industry this year growing 13% yoy
• Online Advertising this year: $25.7 billion growing 8.9% 
• eCommerce growing 11% to $156.1 billion

Why is Affiliate growing so much? Because it’s CPA (Cost Per Action, the advertiser pays only when the desired action is taken), and as marketing budgets are strained the demand for ROI increases. This means tough times for CPC (Cost Per Click) and even tougher times for CPM (Cost Per impression - the M is roman numeral M for 1,000 - the base unit of impressions). That all makes sense. Marketers, especially eCommerce marketers, are facing tough times trying to get the most out of their marketing dollars, and there is much less risk with CPA based approaches.

What I love about this is that the original internet advertising models were all CPA based. Even Larry and Sergey’s 1st idea for a business model for Google was to join the Amazon affiliate program. As the industry grew and the pageviews and speculation went up and brand advertisers and agencies hopped in with the model they were familiar with, impressions. When I worked at a large online publisher of specialty content in the late ’90’s (Women.com, since acquired by iVillage), this was all we sold. Impressions to big advertisers. 

Then it came. The bust. 2000/2001. Everything went awry, you could drive down 101 again, rent an apartment in San Francisco without waiting in line, we all got laid off, the party was over. I was lucky, I landed at Google, and at that time, we even sold only CPM based ads. As the situation got worse, and Google got more advertisers, we switched how we charged customers for ads. No, not CPA, where the publisher bears all the risk, and CPM wasn’t working for advertisers - they needed results. Out came CPC where the risk of the spend is shared by the publisher and the advertiser. That made a lot of sense, and still does in many situations, and that market has matured to say the least.

So here we are, 2009, times are tough, this market has matured, and marketers need more security that their online spend will perform. Hence, the CPA revolution is upon us.

Many people think that CPC strikes the right balance by maintaining tension between the publisher and the advertiser. If this is a good thing, then why will CPA succeed? Well, the tension is still there with CPA and is provided by the fact that leads are a scarce resource, and the more leads you can provide as a publisher, the more the advertiser pays per lead. In order to move up the food chain, a publisher needs to provide more leads. This leads to more efficiency in their placement, optimization, and hence, revenues. While advertisers need to more efficient at converting those leads in order to increase their value to publishers. The model was right in the first place.

So what does that mean next? Advertisers need to spend the effort to get their CPA programs working, and publishers need to start making sure their traffic to advertisers perform. CPM won’t die, and since the ability to track it’s effectiveness is increasing and will continue to do so, it will grow and probably as a result of more dollars moving online from other mediums. But this is the year of the CPA. Affiliate programs will grow, and more publishers will offer CPA based offerings, even if they have to buy companies or call it by another name or both.

What’s that have to do with Ztail you ask? Tomorrow we are launching a CPA based program for eCommerce retailers that offers a lot of value to the users. 

This is going to be fun.

Since we launched What’s it Worth?, the internet pricing guide, you haven’t seen much posting activity from us. Why you ask? Where did we go? Well, it’s not like we were the king of blogging,  I also heard that blogging was dead, but that isn’t it. We’ve been busy!

Doing what you ask? 

We have been working on the pricing guide, but mostly we have been:

1. analyzing pricing data
2. building a new business model that harnesses the power of the pricing guide (ok, “harness the power” is a little dramatic, but it’s pretty cool)
3. building a new product… that we are launching next week!

The folks over at Talkibie suggest that we’re trying to “get back to the roots of eBay”. Are we? Maybe. While that may not be our direct goal, we do think it should be easier to sell your stuff. And buy new stuff. We think the rules of ownership are changing and we want to be part of that change. If that means we’re putting the eBay back in eBay, then that’s ok with us as well.

The cool folks at Thrillist gave us some props…check it outhere. As they say in the write-up “Tail provides pinpoint pricing on anything you’ve got lying around”. We like being called “Tail” and are stoked to make the Thrillist “List”.

Thanks, Thrill.

Aw yeah…Ztail on the AirWaves. We’re taking Worthing to the skies. Check out our CEO, Bill Hudak on Bloomberg Radio talking about Ztail. Click here to listen.

Hey check us out in the New York Times!

We’re excited about the coverage and the discussion it generated. Interesting when you read the comments…some liked it, some didn’t, most were pretty vocal about their thoughts one way or another. Looks like everyone is concerned about our ability to generate a community. We know it won’t be easy - if it were, someone would have done it already - but we believe in the value of what a Ztail community can provide and we’re committed to making it a reality. Take a look and comment if you want…

Ztail made a short list with some big company recently in a post on Search Marketing Standard.

In the article, Ztail is listed among the “Five Companies That Will Determine the Future of Comparison Shopping”. The list is:

1. Microsoft
2. Google
3. The Find
4. Singlefeed
5. Ztail.

The list is in alphabetical order too.

Woohoo, we launched today and are excited to show the new Ztail to the world. Day one and we’ve already got some decent chatter from an article on TechCrunch. Check it out here.

Hello,