Fighting an online price war? This Turkish startup wants to make sure you don’t lose

Price comparison services are an essential tool for any avid online consumer. Looking to buy the new iPhone? A simple search query will give you detailed price listings across a variety of different ecommerce sites. Shoppers can use these engines to filter and compare products based on price, features, and other search criteria.

For ecommerce companies, however, such affiliate services can be a double-edged sword. While they benefit by giving more traffic and search queries, it is also possible to lose a potential customer on the basis of a price differential of a few dollars. Online shoppers are notoriously price-sensitive, and will go to lengths to hunt for the best deals.

Prisync, an Istanbul-based startup, wants to help ease this pain point for ecommerce ventures. Its SaaS solution gives a price comparison service to enterprise clients, allowing them to continually monitor rival sites and competing products.

How it works is fairly straightforward. If, for example, you run an online store selling mobile phones, then you can use Prisyncs’ solution to keep track of the competition. The startup will provide an automated feed, updated four times per day, on price changes in rival websites. All the data is available on a web dashboard, with instant notifications on price fluctuations and stock updates. “We can update any price, from any company, operating anywhere in the world,” says Burc Tanir, CEO of Prisync.

Tanir is an industrial engineer by training, but initially harbored ambitions of becoming a neuroscientist. However, during a trip to Thailand in 2011, he decided to shelve plans of a traditional, academic career, and focus solely on entrepreneurship.

The startup launched its minimum viable product in early 2014 after incorporating feedback from early adopters and potential clients. It was able to close a US$150,000 seed investment deal, which provided the funding for hiring a team and expanding product features.

Prisync is Tanir’s second venture, after the entrepreneur failed in his first idea – an instant messaging solution for enterprise clients – sort of like Slack. “I didn’t want to give up my wish of being an entrepreneur and was determined to bounce back,” he says.

Prisync Team

Learning from failure

While the idea didn’t take off, Tanir retained some important lessons from the experience, which he avoided when developing Prisync. “In the B2B space it is imperative to focus on product, with emphasis on service coming after. We failed because we offered too many customizations, and could not build a single, scalable solution,” he says.

For his second venture, the entrepreneur wanted to continue a general focus on the B2B sector. Ecommerce was booming in Turkey. Some of Tanir’s friends, who ran online stores in the country, constantly complained about tough competition and price wars. “They [my friends] were manually tracking prices every day, spending countless hours in unproductive tasks. By automating this process for them, I could add a lot of value and efficiency,” he explains.

Tanir was convinced there was need for a price comparison solution – helping his friends beat competition and increase conversions. Initial discussions with some ecommerce companies confirmed his view, and he began work on building the product. “I want my solution to be accessible to all, and not just the big guys,” he explains.

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