iPrice Group announces it has received $550,000 (around Rp 7.2 billion) seed funding from Asia Venture Group (AVG) to setup largest online shopping community in Southeast Asia. Based in Malaysia and has been available in seven countries, including Indonesia, it’s already aggregated more than three million products from many online stores.
Founded in October 2014, Co-founder and CTO Heinrich Wendel said that the idea of the website was to create the most delightful online shopping experience by giving shoppers an intuitive and visual way to discover products. Beside six Southeast Asian countries, iPrice also operates in Hong Kong.
“Whereas other sites in the space are all about comparing prices, we focus on narrowing down the vast amount of products to your personal preference. No matter whether you are looking for a blue and black dress, three inch high heels, a solid bag pack, or a classic Chesterfield sofa, we will show you where you can get the best offer,” he added.
In the future, the company aims to double down on it’s machine learning algorithms to further improve the “smart search” and provide individual recommendations according to the user’s browsing behavior.
With this funding, Wendel told DailySocial, “Our focus was getting all the basics set-up. With the new funding we will now focus on new things. First, we will be able to bring the product to a completely new level integrating machine learning algorithms for categorization and tagging as well as adding personal recommendations amongst other things. Second, we will improve and extend our relationships with e-commerce merchants.”
In Indonesia, iPrice has already collaborated with large number of online stores, ranging from groceries, fashion products, to travel packages. Not only displaying products, iPrice also provides sort of coupon code and discount information. Every click will bring the consumer directly to its original source, so its business model must be related with affiliation.
