NASA and the Nobel Prize committee may be faced with more complex calculations, but for most of us, figuring out the best deal in a cell phone/ wireless plan combination in our local area comes about as close as we ever get to higher mathematics.
But visitors seeking a roadmap through the wireless dark can turn to a consumer Web site, MyRatePlan.com, that consolidates information about available cell plans and handsets into a searchable database that users can access.
That wasn’t always the plan for MyRatePlan. Founder Allan Keiter had a background directing pricing and revenue strategies at large service companies, including United Parcel Service, Continental Airlines and BellSouth Cellular, now part of Cingular Wireless. He originally started consolidating wireless plan prices as a service to the industry players themselves. But by the late ‘90s, both mobile phone and Internet usage were taking off in the U.S., and Keiter saw a consumer-facing Web site as a valuable service.
MyRatePlan set out to be the mobile-phone version of an Orbitz or Travelocity online travel agent site, with perhaps a possibility of licensing its vertical search technology to large phone resellers or electronics chains. In fact, for a brief while, Bellsouth Wireless licensed the MyRatePlan platform.
“But the tech recession hit, and that never came to pass,” Keiter says. “And while it’s possible to sell into a Radio Shack or Best Buy, for a small company like ours that’s a very long sales cycle.”
But in 2003, along came local number portability, allowing people to switch phone providers while retaining their numbers. Married to growth in e-commerce, that created a big market for buying phones online rather than through carrier channels—and a transaction-driven business model for MyRatePlan.com.
To use the MyRatePlan.com site to find a wireless plan, a user selects either a single-line or multiple-line service on the start page and inputs a ZIP code to get a page with a matrix of providers in that local area, arranged both by carrier and by price and monthly anytime minutes. The user then checks off a number of criteria such as free nights and weekends, free incoming calls or a national calling area; with each check, the matrix adjusts to show the providers and plans offering those features.
It’s a nice visual representation of the available choices, and sometimes that’s all a user might need to find the optimal selection. But those interested in researching further can click on the carrier logos and get a comprehensive listing of their plans for that service area, or click on the specific plan and get more information about the phones the carrier sells for use with those plans.
As an additional step, users can select a carrier and a plan, enter a few facts about their monthly calling patterns—namely, average monthly minutes and the percentage they use on nights and weekends—to get a picture of the real cost, and possible saving, of a specific plan. The site’s algorithm accepts that usage information, maps out all the plans in the local matrix that are within 10% to 15% of the optimum price, and lights their icons up in green for a nice visual clue.
If the user wants, he or she can factor in other usage data, such as the proportion of incoming calls and their post-7 p.m. or mobile-to-mobile calls, to get an even more specific picture of the costs and possible savings of a new plan.
In fact, when the MyRatePlan.com site first started up, this TruBill cost calculator was at the heart of the site. “When we first launched MyRatePlan, it was basically the calculator piece, and it was somewhat lengthy to get through,” Keiter says. ‘But we found that not everyone either has all the information at their fingertips or wants to be bothered. So we redesigned the tool so people can use it and be out in about 10 seconds. It’s still a lot easier than driving to the Verizon store, the Cingular store, and so on.”
Of course, some visitors—perhaps those handing off the bills to another family member?-- are more interested in finding the carriers that offer those mobile-handset bells and whistles than in finding the very best pricing plan. For them, MyRatePlan.com offers a sister site, MyPhoneFinder.com. The structure of the search is largely the same: Enter a ZIP code to set the service area, choose single- or family-line, then add the criteria you want on your phone, from camera and MP3 player to color display and Web capabilities. The only difference is that users can weight these features to indicate their relative importance.
The result is a product comparison page that lists up to ten phones that fill the bill. Users can click to a product detail page for each phone or click to be connected to a third-party reseller from whom the can buy the phone.
So far, that’s MyRatePlan’s income stream: a share of the transaction for hooking searchers up with phone sellers such as InPhonic or with online agents for the carriers for service contracts. The site does not sell either phones or plans directly.
“Ultimately, we’re performance marketers,” Keiter says. “We could take pay for clickthroughs the way many other comparison shopping sites do. But I think we do a lot better revenue-wise by earning a referral fee for linking a vendor with a user who ultimately buys phone X or plan Y. It works because our depth of content is so good that by the time somebody leaves our site, they pretty much know what they want and are very disposed to buy.”
While the site does not engage with the mobile carriers directly, getting its pricing information mostly from outside public sources, it does respect many of their marketing policies. For example, Keiter says, T-Mobile requests that its resellers not list the price for some makes of handset until a prospect has linked it to a specific calling plan; MyRatePlan according tags those prices as “Too low to show”.
As for driving traffic, MyRatePlan is caught in something of a bind. The cellular phone segment is a pretty competitive search marketing field, of course, with relatively high keyword prices for pay-per-click ads and a rough scramble for any site looking to get to the top of organic search rankings. Keiter admits that the site does not use paid search as aggressively as it might because of those high prices, but says traffic has been growing fairly steadily at about a 50% rate over the last few years.
Unlike the online travel sites, where visitors can show up to browse for trips several times a year, most users are only going to come to MyRatePlan once every two years or so to investigate phone services. But those who do come are qualified in-market buyers, Keiter points out, and at a fairly advanced stage in their research. And while the site only posts daily traffic numbers in the low to mid-five-figures—“about what Yahoo! draws in eight seconds,” he says—those customers have proven fairly good for conversions and thus revenue.
