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The days of retail personnel browsing other stores, clipboard in hand, to check and compare their competitors’ prices are long gone; now all it takes to find the going rate for a product is a quick look online. While Australian startup Pricify provides a platform for consumers to track prices and be notified when a price change occurs, no one startup has cornered the market with a service that automates the price comparison process for online retailers.
Turkish startup
Prisync, which has already found a number of Australian clients, hopes to be that service. Founded by Burc Tanir, Samet Atdag, Neslihan Saygili, Prisync is a price tracking platform which allows ecommerce companies to easily monitor thousands of prices set by their competitors and readjust their own.
Though Turkey is not especially known as a huge ecommerce market, Tanir said the space saw a boom around 2013, and it was at this point that the idea for Prisync came about.
“We had quite a few friends working in ecommerce, either as entrepreneurs or employees. They were quite smart guys, but we were shocked that most of their day to day operations contained too much manual work regarding competitor tracking. We thought that automating that process could really help all those people and companies. Eventually, we managed to close deals with three companies at the idea stage, which really gave us the 'Go!'” Tanir said.
The platform, which has raised USD$170,000 in seed funding from an Istanbul angel investment group, originally launched in early 2014. After signup, a user can import their own product links, then add links from their competitors that they want to track. Prisync then updates the price and stock availability information for those products four times a day, with the prices and further data analysis and insights displayed in the user’s dashboard. A user can also choose to activate automatic email alerts, which will send if a price change is detected.
The opportunity in the space is huge; ecommerce sales topped $1.5 trillion last year, and with 65 clients across more than 15 countries already on board, Prisync is looking beyond Turkey and Europe from the get go. However, while Prisync is being used by companies including Nike and Toshiba, Tanir said the startup’s focus is on providing small to medium enterprises with an affordable service, as this is an untapped market.
“There are more than 200,000 ecommerce companies with annual revenues of more than USD$1 million, and those 200,000 ecommerce companies worldwide are a clear target for us,” Tanir said.
While UpstreamCommerce is perhaps the best known name in the space with thousands of big retailers among its customers, Prisync also has a number of competitors in the SME market, including Price2Spy and Wiser. However, Tanir believes that as well as its API access and integration with any web store, the superiority of Prisync lies in its customer service.
Prisync offers users self service and managed plans, with a managed plan connecting a client with a dedicated account manager who will provide customised reporting and pricing review meetings. A free plan will allow users to track 100 product URLs, with paid plans ranging from 1,000 to 100,000 products.
The platform has already partnered with Shopify, having launched an app that offers Shopify users easy integration. The road to growth, said Tanir, lies in new partnerships with other ecommerce providers to further automate the price tracking process, eliminating the time consuming task of manually adding product.
Prisync will also be looking to partner with providers of other ecommerce-related technology, such as marketing automation and A/B testing tools, to create a more comprehensive ecommerce platform.
