With OneClick, SmartyPig creates a “saving cart” across the web

Extending the reach of its goal-based online saving bank, SmartyPig today will introduce OneClick, a feature that lets users start saving for a product on any ecommerce website. Whether it’s saving for a television on Amazon or a treadmill on Walmart.com, SmartyPig no longer requires its users to return to its website to start a…

SmartyPig’s Google Chrome chrome extension OneClick enables users to start a goal outside of its website.

Extending the reach of its goal-based online saving bank, SmartyPig today will introduce OneClick, a feature that lets users start saving for a product on any ecommerce website.

Whether it’s saving for a television on Amazon (above) or a treadmill on Walmart.com, SmartyPig no longer requires its users to return to its website to start a new goal.

OneClick is a Google Chrome extension that provides – as the title suggests – a one-click experience to load the details of a product into a SmartyPig goal. The user completes the new goal by entering an end date.

“With SmartyPig OneClick you don’t have a shopping cart, you have a saving cart,” said Jon Gaskell, co-founder of Social Money, the company behind SmartyPig and other fintech products.

Upon reaching a goal, SmartyPig users are offered a variety of ways to spend their savings, including a prepaid card with 1 percent cash back or a retailer gift card with cash boosts of up to 11 percent of the total amount saved.

When asked if OneClick would make an appearance on the retailer’s site itself, Gaskell (right) said SmartyPig is “currently having discussions with leading merchants” about how they might benefit one another.

About 80 percent of SmartyPig’s customers are between 18-45, Gaskell said. The site’s average goal is around $1,500 with a length of just over one year.

“We anticipate that OneClick will lead to the creation of a lot more goals that are shorter in length and for less money,” Gaskell said.

As to the familiarity of a browser extension to SmartyPig’s userbase, co-founder Mike Ferrari said he thinks it’s becoming more familiar, thanks in part to Amazon’s WishList extension. “But I do think there will be an educational process, no doubt,” he added.

One option still missing from OneClick is the ability to share the goal on social networks – a feature that’s a staple of SmartyPig. The addition of social sharing is in the works, Ferrari said. Support for other web browsers and integration into Social Money’s enterprise products – GoalSaver and CorePro – are in the plans, as well.

Recent $1 million internal round

Social Money last week quietly closed a $1 million round of financing from unnamed internal investors.

“It really is just to support our current growth initiatives,” Gaskell said. “We’re evolving differently, a little bit differently than we thought we would be even 60-90 days ago.”

In a group interview Friday with SPN, Gaskell, Ferrari and the startup’s CEO Scott McCormack did not share specific uses of the new funds.

When asked if the new funding is part of a larger raise, McCormack said the company hasn’t “considered that necessity.”

In April, Social Money’s director of marketing Sarah Foss told SPN that the company’s expansion from offering a consumer-only product (SmartyPig) to an enterprise product (GoalSaver) did not include funding. The company last raised capital, Foss said, in 2009.

 

Credits: Screenshot courtesy of Social Money. Jon Gaskell photo from LinkedIn

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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