Picture the announcer in the middle of the ring broadcasting – “In this corner, wearing the red shorts we have the challenger, weighing 217 pounds, winner of this year’s collegiate championship, introducing Sales Mindset. Defending the long-standing …

http://pfblogs.org/search/zecco

I found 4 or 5 posts related directly to customer experiences with zecco when I searched. Hope that helps.

In July 2007, I see no improvements in what they offer to a user who has low trading, and wants to open an account with $1000 maximum, with no maintenance fees, and Real Time Trades, without other 3rd party software to use the Zecco.com site, as is the current requiurement by Scottrade to its customers who now have to download other 3rd party software to be able to use Real Time Trade software.

Have you or others seen any improvements in customer satisfaction at Zecco.com??

First take a look at E*Trade. They did around $1,5 billion revenue last year — some $500 million of which came from commissions and the rest from interest on accounts and revenue from margin trades. Their expences ran to around $ 1,2 billion so without the commissions they would have lost around $300. However, part of this has to do with the fact that their customer aquisition costs are very high. We estimate around $6 pr. trade.

Now try and apply the same numbers (or ratios) to the Zecco.com business model: We will be paying $2 per trade (the actual cost of doing the trade) but saving the $6 per trade in advertising and instead rely on word-of-mouth (after all, we have a pretty good story to tell).

What this ads up to is the following: Same income potential on interests and margins for Zecco. The best pricing on trades for the consumer (free) and a customer aquisition cost that we believe will be significantly lower than E*Trade’s because we have a better offer.

On top of that we also hope to make some revenue on advertising on the site.

Let me explain how this works. Essentially the site consists of three areas. A financial news portal like MSN investor or Yahoo Finance. A blogging network. And a trading platform. The financial news portal will have banner ads and Adwords (like MSN Investor). The blogs will have Adwords — and we will share the revenue these blogs deliver 50/50 with our bloggers. The trading platform will have no advertising … we want to keep the actual trading machine clean, uncluttered and be focused on trading.

So, to sum up the business model. It will work without any income from advertising whatsoever … but as we grow revenue from adverts will grow as well.

I believe the business model is viable and will benefit consumers as well as turn a tidy profit.

Finally … the reason that you have been contacted by Zecco.com is that we like your blog. We’re not interested in having just anyone blog on Zecco.com … but we are actively looking for blogs we like and believe would be of interest to our users once we launch … and yours certainly match that profile.

I invite you to check out Zecco.com once we launch … take a look at what’s there. My guess it that you will like it.

From a revenue-share and blogging perspective I also believe that you will quickly see our userbase grow …making it possible for the best financial bloggers to get much more traffic through Zecco.com than on their own.

I am very interested in hearing your observations … so please continue checking us out and let us hear your opinions. We are not only in this for the money (although that is certainly also a factor) … we are also seriously trying to level the playing field for the average investor by creating more ways of sharing ideas, thoughts, approaches and experiences between users.