iPrice scales their ecommerce platform with Productsup

Case

Established in 2014, iPrice is Southeast Asia’s largest price comparison site – a one-stop destination for online shoppers to find the best prices online to save money. iPrice’s platform compares billions of offers from all of the major ecommerce platforms, enabling online shoppers to make informed purchasing decisions. iPrice operates local websites in eight countries within the APAC region and partners with a variety of online merchants across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Australia. Their catalog contains products from various categories, including electronics, home & living, fashion, and health & beauty.

Before implementing the Productsup Product-to-Consumer (P2C) platform, iPrice was struggling to integrate unstructured and disordered product information provided by the many different merchants they were collaborating with for their ecommerce platform. Their Technical department had to standardize and optimize every data feed they received individually, which consumed a tremendous amount of time and resources. After introducing Productsup, iPrice’s merchant integration team was able to take full control of merchant onboarding, managing more than 1,000 merchant feeds efficiently and independently from the Technical team. The team now onboards a new merchant onto the ecommerce platform in less than 3 hours.

Challenges

• Poor data quality
• Limited technical resources
• Slow time-to-market

As a price aggregator, iPrice had to integrate a steadily growing number of merchants onto their platform in order to keep their product price comparison offering up-to-date. However, onboarding new merchant data feeds was a daunting task, as every merchant provided their feed via different sources and in various formats.

This required the merchant integration team to rely on their Technical team to help standardize and optimize the data feeds received by their merchant partners in order to integrate them onto its platform. With stretched technical resources, it took the team on average one month to onboard five merchants.

This slow process hampered iPrice’s business growth and blocked the merchant integration team from onboarding new merchants in a fast and efficient manner. It quickly became obvious that they needed to invest in marketing technology to ensure their business could run profitably.

Solutions

• Control of merchant onboarding process
• Tailoring product information
• Independence from Technical department

In order to manage and speed up the merchant onboarding process, iPrice’s merchant integration team decided to implement the Productsup Product-to-Consumer platform. The platform provides the team with the right toolset to transform merchant data into the required format.

The Data View function helps the team to visualize the imported data, providing a 360-degree view on all different merchant feeds. Meanwhile, the Data Flow enables them to standardize and map the received merchant data to fit iPrice’s ecommerce platform requirements. Productsup’s error-monitoring platform capabilities inform the team immediately of any issues that occur during the data import or export process.

The merchant integration team can now easily handle the merchant onboarding process without depending on their Technical department. Due to Productsup’s user-friendly interface, even non-tech savvy team members can navigate the platform with ease.

Results

• Smooth and easy onboarding of merchants
• Fast time-to-market
• Excellent data quality

Thanks to the Productsup Product-to-Consumer platform, iPrice has successfully integrated more than 1,000 merchants to their platform to date. And, it allows them to constantly add new partners to their ecommerce platform with ease.

Currently, iPrice onboards 2-3 new partners a month onto their platform, processing roughly 500,000 products with the platform. During their business ramp-up period alone, they added around 100 partners in the given timeframe. Before using Productsup, they could only onboard five vendors per month. Now, the average onboarding time for a new merchant takes less than 3 hours, which is about 10 times as fast. This enables them to significantly scale their business to new product categories and markets, and ultimately, accelerate global growth.

Generally, iPrice’s merchant integration team is amazed by the speed, accuracy, and flexibility of the platform and the support offered by the Productsup customer service team. It saves them a great amount of time and resources while guaranteeing excellent data quality, and ensuring a seamless customer experience.

Future plans

iPrice will continue to use the Productsup Product-to-Consumer platform to further scale their business and add new merchants on their platform. They recently expanded their business to the Australian market by launching https://iprice.au/, and will actively use Productsup to onboard additional merchants in that region. With the support of Productsup’s customer service team, they will constantly explore new platform features and use cases to ensure staying ahead of the game in the APAC region.