Upside’s digital marketplace reaches nearby consumers and uses personalized promotions to influence them to choose our partners over the competition. As we add retail partners to the marketplace, Upside gets more and more valuable for our users — they benefit from additional options in multiple everyday categories. As they transact more, our retail partners benefit, which attracts additional retailers to the marketplace.

The “marketplace effect” isn’t just an academic concept. It helps businesses expand their customer reach and drive incremental sales. Upside puts this into practice every day, and a multi-category retailer like K-VA-T is especially well-positioned to tap into our flywheel. 

One metropolitan region in the Northeast illustrates what we can drive for K-VA-T. Take a closer look for a real example of our impact in action.

A real-life Upside case study

Years ago, the Upside marketplace in this particular region started with fuel stations only (since Upside’s origin was in fuel). Over time, it steadily grew to include grocery stores and hardware stores, as well. The region began to transform when a major grocery chain agreed to a full launch of all its stores in the marketplace.

After that happened, grocery transactions in our marketplace rose 16% month-over-month, and 37% year-over-year. More than half of active Upside users in the region shopped at the grocer of a trailing 90-day window. That bears repeating — more than one of every two Upside shoppers in this region claimed an offer at the grocer over just a three-month period. 

Now, at the same time, it wasn’t just the grocer that benefitted from additional activity on Upside. Transactions in other categories increased, too. One gas station in particular felt that impact even more acutely. Once the grocer joined Upside, this fuel retailer doubled its monthly gallons, and tripled its new customers per month introduced through Upside. Across the market, average fuel transactions per site per day more than doubled, a 108% lift versus a 66% lift in comparable markets (in other words, 42% above benchmark).

And that wasn’t all. A Northeast hardware chain captured high incremental value during the same period — 86% of Upside-attributed sales at the hardware chain were incremental. 

In six months, the hardware retailer earned more than $640,000 in incremental profit at an impressive +130% ROI with Upside. Additionally, more than 90% of returning Upside guests were new or infrequent pre-Upside.

K-VA-T can tap into Upside’s existing marketplace

Cross-category users accelerate Upside’s growth. In fact, Upside users who transact in multiple categories can visit up to 3x more and spend up to 2x more than single-category users. This is the basis of our impact, the mechanism behind the halo that we see in multi-category markets.

And as a multi-category retailer, K-VA-T is well-positioned to unlock the growth experienced by the businesses in the above example — all for itself.

Get in touch with our team of retail experts to learn more about Upside and how we can serve your business.