“Why is my bill going up?”

Upside is designed to bring you more profit

Upside drives net profit to your stations by helping fill your excess capacity with profitable, incremental transactions. As we’ve previously shared, more efficiently utilizing open pump capacity is the best way to increase profitability for your business. And since Upside is a pay-for-performance solution, you only incur costs on proven, incremental business. By design, you will always earn more in profit than you spend on program costs. We ensure this through margin-bound promotions and our profit sharing arrangement. 

Upside puts your excess capacity to work for you, using available gross margin to bring you profit. While Upside-funded boosts (such as new-user bonuses) may sometimes increase promotion amounts in the app to a level that looks greater than your margin, the base promotion amount — the amount that you are paying for — is always within your available margin. By working within your margin, Upside ensures you only pay for new business that is both incremental and profitable — after taking into account all of your costs, as well as Upside’s fees and promotion costs. 

Additionally, Upside’s profit-sharing model is designed to ensure we only make money when you do. Upside makes money by taking a percentage of the incremental profit we deliver to participating retailers. By only taking a cut of incremental profit (after the promotion cost has been accounted for), Upside ensures retailers always earn new profit on every incremental transaction. 

More consumers, more profit

To acquire more customers and deliver them (and more profit) to our retailers’ sites, Upside invests more than $100 million in consumer marketing every year. Upside is a top radio advertiser, frequently outperforming other top brands like Indeed and Dairy Queen. Listen to an example Upside radio ad below.

Moreover, inflation and rising prices have created a shift in consumer behavior as people seek savings on everyday purchases. As a result of the current economic climate and our marketing efforts, more consumers than ever are turning to Upside. This recent growth has translated to more transactions and greater incremental profit for you — but it also means a bigger bill.

So you’re telling me bigger bills are better? 

It sounds counterintuitive, but yes — with Upside, bigger bills are actually better! The amount you pay in Upside fees and promotions each month is a result of the incremental business delivered to your site. That incremental volume is going to keep growing, which means your investment in Upside will also continue to grow. This is a good thing, since it means you’re capturing more incremental gallons that would otherwise have gone to your competitors. Your bill will always be less than the total incremental profit delivered by Upside during a given invoice period, so if your bill is going up, the amount of incremental profit and transaction volume delivered by Upside is also on the rise. 

Remember, you only pay for gallons and profit driven by Upside which you otherwise would not have captured.

Growth in Upside volume is exciting — it means that Upside is achieving our goal of driving measurable new profit to your business. As Upside continues to reach more consumers and bring even more businesses onto the platform, we will be able to deliver even more new volume to your sites. As more businesses that consumers want to shop at join Upside, consumers will transact more and more, meaning more profit for you — that’s the Upside virtuous cycle.

In summary

• Upside is a pay-for-performance solution.
• You will only ever pay fees & promotions on Upside-driven transactions that are both incremental and profitable.
• The more profit delivered by Upside, the higher your bill will be.
• BUT, you will always earn more in incremental profit than you spend on program costs.