Area served North America Services Online services Headquarters Burlingame Type of business Private | Key people Laurence Marks (CEO) Website BlueKangaroo.com Founded 2010 | |
 | ||
Industry Social Commerce, Big Data | ||
Blue Kangaroo (formerly ChoozOn) is an American company headquartered in Burlingame, California, with additional offices in Bellevue, Washington, and Amman, Jordan. It is most known for its social shopping website and accompanying iOS and Android apps. The mobile apps and website encourage users to personalize their shopping experience by choosing their favorite brands and categories. Users can add products to their profiles and see what other users are sharing. The mobile apps allow users to save and present in-store coupons through their mobile devices, and also alert users to sales while shopping. The company aggregates in-store coupons and online deals through partnerships with merchants and affiliate companies.
Contents
Blue Kangaroo is both a deal aggregator for consumers and a big data company for ad networks and retailers. The company emphasizes a two-part value proposition whereby users receive personalized deals and offers based on their shopping profiles in exchange for permission to follow their online retail engagement anonymously.
By collecting permission-based data from users, Blue Kangaroo also holds a stake in the field of big data, with over a billion collected shopping events. Part of the company’s revenue is generated by selling aggregated anonymous user data to third parties to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads, and in order to better understand consumers, audiences, and market trends through predictive modeling and analytics. Users may opt out of the transfer of non-personally identifiable information to third parties by disabling the feature in their account settings.
History
Blue Kangaroo was founded in 2010 as ChoozOn Corporation by former Yahoo! Inc. executives Nick Weir, Usama Fayyad, and Hunter Madsen. The company marketed itself as a deal aggregator in which users, after signing up, were able to specify their favorite brands and receive deals and promotions via ChoozOn's website, which launched in the summer of 2011. ChoozOn created partnerships with merchants and affiliate marketers that allowed the company to receive commissions from the sale of products linked from the company's website. In August 2011, it received angel funding of $3.2 million and received an additional $1.2 million in venture funding on January 30, 2012. On May 17, 2012, the company launched an iOS app of the same name and with similar features to the ChoozOn website.
In August 2012, the company released the results of an online survey it conducted that revealed that 65% of consumers are highly interested in receiving web deals related to their shopping interests and 83% are interested in a service that could declutter their inboxes and provide them with the best deals. In September 2012, the company renamed itself Blue Kangaroo to better position itself in the consumer marketplace while pursuing distribution partnerships, including one with Skyfire for which it provides a service to alert users to deals on websites where users are shopping.
Blue Kangaroo launched an Android app on December 26, 2012, and an iOS app on February 27, 2013. The company released a Google Chrome Extension on November 21, 2014, and in March 2015, it released the latest version of the website with a focus of providing the best products, deals, and local offers to consumers.
As of August 2015, Blue Kangaroo has partnered with more than 2,000 national bricks-and-mortar and online retailers and features deals from more than 100,000 local merchants in North America.
Products
Blue Kangaroo’s products include a website, iOS and Android apps, and a Google Chrome desktop browser extension.
Blue Kangaroo's website features trending products, online and in-store coupons and promo codes from thousands of stores, as well as deals on local merchants. Registered users can personalize their shopping experience, create and share their own shopping preferences and discoveries, and create customized user boards that track individual shopping needs, wish lists, and gift ideas.
Both the iOS and Android mobile apps feature a style and function similar to the Blue Kangaroo website. Users can find both products and deals for their favorite brands and personalize their settings.
With Blue Kangaroo's Chrome Extension, users can add products to their personal boards and profiles directly from retailers’ websites. These finds appear both in-app and on the users’ profiles.