Frank Han, one of the early retail e-commerce entrepreneurs who co-founded eToys before running the Home Shopping Network’s retail web site, is taking over as president and CEO of local shopping service Cairo.com, which provides information on current local in-store promotions to drive traffic into retail chains. “I was struck by the power of this idea, to help people save money and optimize shopping in the 90% of retailing that’s still done in stores,” he tells Internet Retailer.
Cairo, founded two years ago and based in San Francisco, collects information on promotions in major retail chain stores in local markets across the U.S., and lets consumers search by ZIP code and street address for promotions in nearby stores, including mass merchants, drug stores and supermarkets.
“We see a lot of web sites focused on the online shopping side of things, like Shopping.com, but what we see less of outside of traditional online media is a local shopping angle,” says Cairo founder Andy Moss, a former executive of DemandTec, a company that provides web-based systems that help retailers plan merchandising and marketing programs based on customer demand.
By hiring Han, Cairo expects to makes its brand as well-known as known as other major online retailers and shopping portals.
"Frank has been instrumental in taking new online consumer brands and turning them into household names," said David Sze, Cairo.com board member and general partner of investment firm Greylock Partners. "His ability to extend brands and run extremely efficient enterprises makes him the ideal executive to lead Cairo.com into its next extreme growth phase."
For Han, Cairo offers a chance to start building a new business on a new idea, just as he did in the early days of online retailing with eToys, he says. And though he was enjoying managing fast growth as executive vice president and general manager of HSN.com, where sales climbed 20% last year to over $300 million, he found the prospect of growth at Cairo too good to pass up, he adds. “I was very happy at HSN, we were having amazing success there, but Cairo was too compelling.”
Cairo uses Internet search crawlers to capture sales promotions from retailers who post their weekly advertising circulars online, and it manually gathers information from the weekly circulars of retailers who don’t post that information online, Han says. Launched last fall with information from about 20 retailers, Cairo now provides promotional information from about 80 retailers, including major mass merchants, apparel, consumer electronics, and drugs and grocery chains.
Cairo is also working on having direct network connections for automatic updates of promotional information from two retailers and hopes to develop more direct connections with other retailers, Han says.
A free service to consumers, Cairo earns its revenue by selling online ads to retailers and consumer products manufacturers. The ads can either link to a retail web site or to a page offering information on where to find a featured product in a store.
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