CouponTrade, a new, fast growing company, is the brainchild of George D. Bousis, who partnered with Brad Wasz in what seems to be a new Internet success story. CouponTrade launched this past April and already employs 16 people and has over 12,000 unique visitors from over 65 countries. Could this become the Internet’s newest phenomenon?
By Margarita Vartholomeou
The son of well-known businessman Dimitris Bousis and philanthropist Eleni Bousis, George, only 24 years old, has great plans for CouponTrade. “Essentially if you are at the Target store, and you come to our site, you can purchase a discounted gift card, have it uploaded to your phone via email or PDF and use it at the store by having the cashier scan your phone,” he says during an interview with NEO.
George Bousis was born in Chicago and attended St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy for high school and graduated from DePaul University. He worked for his father’s company until he went full time with CouponTrade about a year ago.
What is CouponTrade?
We have created an online marketplace that focuses consumer to consumer technology for the sale and purchasing of gift cards and daily deals. We are working with online deal vouchers from companies such as Groupon, LivingSocial, GiltCity and Buy With Me, to gift cards from major retailers such as Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Costco, Amazon and more.
What are your objectives?
Our objective is to create a one stop shop for our buyers and sellers to land on one website and fulfill all of their coupon needs. Our users can sell daily deals and gift cards they have not or will not use, or buy other users deals/gift cards at discounted prices. We also have a new online promo-code section where users will enjoy perks such as free shipping on products, discounts, off retail values and more.
How did you come up with the idea of CouponTrade?
I came up with the idea for CouponTrade in a few different ways. I was working at my father’s grocery chain called Cermak Fresh Market, where I was attempting to digitalize our cut our coupons to better organize them and provide our customers with a simpler and easy to use solution to 'couponing.' By digitalizing the coupons we could earn affiliate fees from the companies and monitor not only our returns, but shopping trends from our customers and brand loyalty. I also got the idea of a marketplace while Coke was running a co-branded promotion with Ritz Crackers. Coca-cola was offering (for only participating stores, which we were not at the time) their customers a free Ritz Cracker Box with the purchase of a 24 pack. Customers were deeply angered that we were not honoring this promotion and were yelling at me.
This idea came to me as I thought if this was really a scam or if it was intended to help shoppers. I went home and thought of the daily deal and gift card space as a similar trend and found that roughly 30% of daily deal vouchers and 20% of gift cards go unused every year. In a business north of $100 billion dollars annually, $20 billion dollars of losses was too big of a number for me to pass by. I wrote up a business plan, did some name searching, consulted my ideas with my current partner and we were onto development shortly after. We received $2 million dollars in private funding and have since been in business for 7 weeks where we have done over $36,000 in business, had over 1,500 transactions processed, have witnessed over 12,000 unique visitors from over 65 countries and 2800 cities world wide. We have been completely overwhelmed with orders and have continued our recruiting process. We currently have 16 employees at our River North Office in downtown Chicago where (4) are programmers (2) are designers (2) are marketing/affiliate managers (2) social media experts (2) customer service representatives (2) writers and my partner and I.
Where do you see CouponTrade going, let us say a year from now?
In our plans for the future, understanding the evolution of technology, we are focusing much of our attention towards mobile and location based technologies. Using this data we will be able to find deals in your exact location relevant to your interests and shopping trends. We will be monitoring your interests by social graphing our users’ social media accounts and associating deals with their exact needs. We will also be revolutionizing the gift card industry by embedding gift card serial codes as bar codes and QR readers where our users can purchase a gift card and use it on the fly. Essentially if you are at the Target store, and you come to our site, you can purchase a discounted gift card, have it uploaded to your phone via email or PDF and use it at the store by having the cashier scan your phone. We will also be digitalizing traditional cut off coupons found in sales papers and streaming them to our users’ phones when they check into a retailer. Nonetheless, if you are shopping at Whole Foods, we will send your any available coupons to your phone where you can use them instantly. Such examples are $1 off coupon for milk, Buy 1 Cereal get 1 free, etc.
Who are the mentors in your life?
I would say that my biggest mentors are my parents Eleni and Dimitri Bousis. My mother for believing in me, supporting me, visiting me all the time at work and being my right hand; and my father for being the man he is as a model father from his accomplishments, his business and himself as an amazing dad.
