Touted as India's first `united customer loyalty programme', NetCarrots.com's USP, said Mr Aditya Poddar one of the co-founders of the site, is its felxible back-end technology and low incremental customer acquisition costs. "We provide our affiliates with a powerful programme that delivers loyal customers at a lower cost and helps expand their marketing reach," Mr Poddar said.

So what's NetCarrots.com's big idea? The company's business model involves providing rewards to its members in form of carrots (points) for their loyalty who in turn reward the affiliates by redeeming more and more carrots at their outlets.

The programme has created a consortium of companies or affiliates - 14 companies have joined in as the loyalty partners including Amazon.com.

MP3.com, Dominos, LG, Electrolux, FabMart and others - which together offer their products and services to the customers. The partner organisations benefit in the form of enhanced customer loyalty, stickiness at low costs and a steady customer flow. Customer, on the other hand, earns and redeems loyalty points across a wide section of affiliates and gets greater liquidity and higher value. For instance, the customer can earn just by surfing through 123india.com and redeem his earnings at Dominos for a pizza.

Thus, the customer is offered multipoint earning and redeeming opportunities both offline and online. These carrots can then be redeemed at NatCarrots.com affiliates on products that the customer chooses. Through the NetCarrots programme, the customer can end up earning carrots worth Rs 1,000-2,000 per month.

NetCarrots will earn revenue on every transaction or activity performed with its loyalty partners. Its other revenues will come from the innovative sales and marketing solutions that it has devised such as Eye of the Carrot, Catch the Carrot; Downloads and others.

The company sees a opportunity of domination for its site: it hopes to have a critical mass of 1.5 lakh users in six months and a member base of one million by the second year of its launch; it projects to have 110 offline partners and 130 online partners by year two. The company expects to reach cash break even within one-and-a-half years and net break even after two and a years from now. In the first year, NetCarrot.com expects to generate revenues to the tune of Rs 3.2 crore.

The company plans to open its operations in the top six metros - Chennai, Bangalore, Calcutta, Mumbai and Hyderabad - by the end of this year. To drive traffic to its site, NetCarrot plans to advertise heavily through the print and outdoor medium (its annual ad budget is Rs 1.8 crore) and opt for online promotions.