Frugal becomes one of the most basic economic principles. That principle is increasingly relevant in such crisis as the current situation. A brand-new startup named Shooper offers a solution that fits the condition by creating a platform to find the cheapest food ingredients. The platform allows users to compare prices in many stores at once to find the most affordable.
Shooper’s Founder & CEO, Oka Simanjuntak said the platform was a community sharing application. This cannot be separated from the establishment of Shooper who was inspired by a group of housewives in Bintaro, South Tangerang, who often shared information about the prices of household needs in the shops around their homes. Simanjuntak, who also had difficulty comparing prices, took the idea and applied it to Shooper.
Shopping receipt as the key
With the crowdsourcing method, Shooper began operating since January this year as an application on Android. The main ability of this platform is how they collect data from shopping receipts. Shooper uses artificial intelligence to read receipts and then analyze the data to see consumer behavior. Analysis of the data then becomes a way of monetization for Shooper.
“Almost all companies successful with analytics, mind to share user data, but they find user patterns interacting on the platform. Therefore, it’s not personal data, but behavior pattern data,” Simanjuntak said via an online press conference.
The other monetization strategy is by using specific target ads. With so many shopping receipts uploaded by users, Shooper can find the characteristics of each user that associate ads to their behavior.
User acquisition target
With these capabilities, Shooper offers a number of features for its users ranging from the lowest price comparison in many supermarkets, making shopping lists, loyalty programs, to shopping report features within a month. All are connected with the Shooper algorithm which helps users get the best price for their basic daily needs.
About three months into operation, he claims the platform has partnered with 1300 stores consisting of supermarkets, minimarkets, or other non-supermarket stores, the majority of which are in South Jakarta and South Tangerang. However, some shops in South Sumatra, Jambi, Papua, Kalimantan and Bali have already covered by them. They chose the offline store because the number of people who shop there is still far greater than in online stores.
Simanjuntak said, the price of household items in online stores is indeed cheaper, but shipping costs make it more expensive than offline stores. He also added that food expenditure could reach 50% of the total expenditure of a household.
“When being compared, transportation spending is only around 9% but there are already two large unicorns from the transportation sector,” he added.
Currently, there are around 1200 Shooper users with 60% actively using it. The products they have recorded has reached more than 10,000 items. Shooper funding status is still running in bootstrap with the help of angel investors. “We hope there will be 100 users at the end of the year and within 2-3 years we can reach 1 million users,” Simanjuntak said.
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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian
