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Pingup Automates Local Commerce Through Buttons And Bots

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Pingup aggregates over 50,000 businesses and enables consumers to schedule service appointments with local businesses anytime, anywhere. Consumers can view merchants’ real-time appointment availability and immediately book appointments, schedule classes and order food. Below is our interview with Mark Slater, CEO of Pingup:

Mark-Slater

Q: What is Pingup? Tell us something more about the company?

A: Pingup is the largest aggregation platform for local services transactions, using our proprietary Appointments Anywhere™ API to connect thousands of local merchants with leading publishers including YP, CitySearch and others, with 100MM+ monthly users and 250MM monthly local searches.

Pingup aggregates over 50,000 businesses, more than double Open Table’s US amount, and powers their transaction buttons. Consumers can view merchants’ real-time appointment availability while on publishers and immediately book appointments, schedule classes and order food.

We are clearly filling a need in the market as we nearly doubled bookings and nearly tripled transaction value in Q1 2016.

This is because consumers are increasingly seeking on-demand, instant completion to their tasks. The old reflex of dialing a 1-800 number is becoming passé. Pingup gives consumers the power to get a merchant’s scheduling information while they are on trusted search publishers. They can do this any time of day or night and on any device.

Pingup is also pairing these complex transactional interactions with a bot style interface on messaging platforms. You’ve probably noticed the fervor Mark Zuckerberg set off at the F8 conference announcing Facebook’s Messenger bots. Interestingly, Pingup has been working on bots for such platforms for the last few years.

Pingup was initially founded with the idea to develop transactions between businesses and consumers on messaging platforms . We were awarded patents in 2015 for chat and bots. (“…These communication options can beinitiated within the dedicated application and include chatting via text within the dedicated application, initiating a telephone call, and using a robot tomake a payment or to make a booking…”) The US market is now catching up with our initial vision so it is very exciting times!

pingup-booking-mobile_optRecommended: Startup 10to8 – Online Booking System That Grows Your Business

Q: What makes Pingup a good choice?

A: Pingup’s buyers are both publishers and scheduling software suppliers with merchant relationships. For both, Pingup offers a simple integration process through a patented API and sophisticated data normalization process.

Prior to Pingup, local service businesses had no way to close the commerce loop with consumers actively searching for them on publishers. There was no access to a merchant’s schedule availability or ability for consumers to “book now” and confirm the transaction.

Pingup 1) connects the highly fragmented marketplace that has scores of publishers and scheduling software suppliers working with millions of local merchants, and 2) manages the user experience and complex data normalization process to ensure a frictionless, accurate booking process.

We have also been thinking about messaging and bots for years. We find that we are helping partners jump start their understanding and roadmaps to take advantage of the white hot chatbot opportunity in local.

pingup-messaging-bot Recommended: Why Online Ordering is Changing the Restaurant Industry?

Q: What do employees love about the company?

A: We are very intensely focused on building the largest transaction platform for local services businesses. So there is a lot of passion in the team for building this new world order. There is a lot of challenging the status quo and support for each other.

Having such a lead on developing bot technology for messaging and seeing the market catch up to us is also very exciting for everyone. I think it’s fair to say the team loves the experience of building a company from scratch that is growing successfully and is now in a white hot market!

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Q: What’s the achievement Pingup is most proud of?

A: We are seeing great results and that is very satisfying. We increased Q1 2016 platform bookings by 173% and transaction value by 273% quarter-over-quarter. Our patents awarded in 2015 for managing user chat experiences with businesses make us proud. As does recently winning the Local Search Association’s (LSA) highly competitive 2016 award for Best Local Commerce Services.

Q: What are your plans for next six months?

A: We will be making several announcements adding new publishers to our network and revealing our chatbot products. The team is heads down and focused on making all this happen, and more.

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