Why pingg Is Different (part #3)
pingg.com
In parts one and two I describe the importance that pingg stresses on the creation and delivery of great looking invitations combined with a host of useful event planning tools. This post will detail our final differentiator – our business model.
Almost immediately you will notice that pingg has No Advertising cluttering up our website or your invitations. We know that unrelated banner advertising detracts from the user’s experience and is one of the fundamental reasons online invites have not evolved. Does anyone really want to see a huge “Weight Watchers” advertisement on the invite for your dinner or office staff party? Some advertisements are just inappropriate, tacky and even offensive.
Our approach from day one has been to identify revenue sources that actually add value to the invitation and event planning process. While our core service is free we offer optional services and functionality for which we charge a fee or earn affiliate fees. These options include:
- Print Invitations – you can choose to send out integrated print invitations (we do all the printing, postage and individual mailing) along with your digital invitations.
- pingg Plus+ service —pingg offers a wide variety of free invitation designs and themes but for a fee you can choose from over two million very unique and original designs for your invitation —an option that is usually not available with other online invitation websites. You can search for just about anything and we should be able to provide a one-of-its-kind invitation.
- Integrated Gift Registries – often a gift registry is appropriate for an event – weddings, wedding showers, children’s birthday parties. With pingg you can easily integrate a gift registry into your invite and event web page which allows your guests to quickly and easily make a gift purchase. There is no cost for this benefit to you as the user but we get a small commission from the registry provider. Our first partner is Amazon Wish Lists. Shortly we will be announcing additional registry partners. Also, we will soon be adding a Charity Registry where guests, in lieu of a gift, can easily make a donation to the charity of their or the host’s choice. We don’t make any commission from this, but consider it a valuable service that will hopefully encourage donations to some worthy causes.
- Mobile Enablement – allows you to send out address and event detail reminders the day of your event or notify everyone of last minute changes. We offer pingg sms/mobile texting packages to help with guest and event communications. You can even send out your invitations by sms/text.
- Tickets – shortly we will be launching a simple and easy system for you to sell tickets for an event —pingg will receive a small fee for this service.
- White Label Service – we offer our core event functionality and application to other websites for either a fee or shared revenue. This is a business to business service.
All these extra services are optional. We think that by not slapping irrelevant advertising all over your invite and event web page you can be proud of your invitations and use pingg for personal and professional events where “look and feel” matters. It also allows us to focus on what is best for the user’s experience rather then being concerned with driving page views (that’s why some of our competitors you don’t put event details in the email – just a link forcing your guests to go to a web page to send a RSVP and be subjected to a lot of advertisements). Because we offer services and choices that are useful to the event host, we consider pingg a superior and a distinctive alternative that gives good value for your time and money.
Lorien Gabel
Co-founder
