Ecommerce aggregator iPrice scores fresh funding in Line-led round

Photo credit: iPrice

Southeast Asia’s business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce market was worth US$10.9 billion last year, and will grow to US$88.1 billion by 2025, according to research from Google and Temasek. An array of online marketplaces and retailers are competing against each other for a piece of that pie, trying to tempt online shoppers with special offers, loyalty perks, and lower prices than their rivals.

Kuala Lumpur-based iPrice isn’t content with winning just some of that multi-billion-dollar opportunity. It wants every online shopper to pass through one of its price comparison sites before making a purchase.

“In the next few years, online shopping will become part of everyday life for everyone in Southeast Asia,” said iPrice group CEO David Chmelař. “Our vision is to be the destination where people start their online shopping.”

That lofty ambition has helped iPrice to secure its first injection of growth capital since its US$4 million series A fundraise in December 2016.

The latest round was led by Line Ventures, the VC arm of the Japanese company behind messaging app Line. Singapore-based Cento Ventures and Indonesia’s Venturra Capital also participated. The amount of the investment was undisclosed, though TechCrunch has reported the amount at around US$4 million based on a source close to the deal.

Our vision is to be the destination where people start their online shopping.

In addition to its home market, iPrice runs price comparison sites in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

It aggregates millions of product listings from a range of online stores and marketplaces, allowing consumers to compare prices for the same item and get the best deal. It makes money by driving sales to these retailers, which pay iPrice for every visit that’s converted into a sale – a model broadly referred to as affiliate marketing.

Since its series A round a year-and-a-half ago, iPrice has expanded its product catalog from several tens of millions of stock-keeping units (SKUs) to over 500 million SKUs across all its markets of operation.

The startup said that more than 50 million online shoppers have visited its sites over the same time frame. It’s on track to hit 150 million visitors this year, with much of the increase accounted for by Indonesia – a market which iPrice said has experienced 30x growth over the past 12 months.

Progress made

IPrice faces competition from a host of price comparison sites, such as Pricebook and PriceArea in Indonesia and Priceza in Thailand. These seem to be largely focused on their home markets, however, and don’t have the geographical coverage that iPrice does at this point.

Another rival is Singapore-based Shopback. It also adopts an affiliate marketing approach, though it has been more focused on funneling shoppers through to ecommerce marketplaces with price-reduction coupons and other special offers. It raised US$25 million last November from a group of investors including Credit Saison, Softbank, and Singtel.

According to SimilarWeb, iPrice clocked 1.06 million site visits in Malaysia in March 2018, beating Shopback’s 677,000.