Price comparison site Pricebook gets second round of funding, aims to break through crowded market

Pricebook’s Indonesia team

Indonesia’s price comparison site Pricebook announced today that it received another round of funding from three investors: Global Brain Corporation, IMJ Investment Partners, and Hiro Mashita of m&s partners. The amount was undisclosed.

This is Pricebook’s second round of funding following a US$150,000 seed investment from Incubate Fund (Japan) in 2013. It plans to use this latest cash infusion to accelerate its growth and to evolve into a marketing platform for both online and offline retailers, according to a statement. Pricebook is also seeking to expand its team.

Pricebook aggregates product specs, reviews, and prices from online and offline shops for consumer electronics items such as mobile phones, cameras, and computers. It recently added mobile phone plans and powerbanks to its product catalog.

By offering transparency about pricing and product quality, Pricebook hopes to make the shopping experience more enjoyable for both customers and sellers. For users, reviews and forum threads deliver honest answers to their questions. For merchants, Pricebook provides shop exposure and market data to support their online marketing.

Screenshot of Pricebook’s mobile phone plan comparison

According to founder and CEO Tomonori Tsuji, Pricebook wants to become a major platform to connect online and offline commerce. The site has recently introduced special discount vouchers that incentivize shoppers to go to a store to make the purchase – and let both Pricebook and the merchant know their Pricebook listing has paid off.

Pricebook is actually a Japanese startup established in September 2013, but it opened a local office in Indonesia and launched its product here in December 2013.

When Tech in Asia reported on Pricebook’s first round of funding, the company claimed to have 6,000 products listed and over 10,000 prices from around 30 shops in its database. Today, there are more than 20,000 product listings on the site, from both online and offline shops. Several hundred shops update their their pricing information at least once a week, says Tomonori, while he claims that monthly visits to the site are at “several hundred thousand”.

However, Pricebook has so far not followed through on delivering a mobile app; a goal which they had announced in 2013. “We [are] still discussing the priority,” says Tomonori.

At the moment, the priority seems to be in getting more merchants on board, and developing the platform itself. According to Tomonori, the company is “aiming to become a platform where customers and merchants help themselves.”

Price comparison sites usually operate on a cost-per-click model and are paid every time a consumer is referred to the seller’s website. Sometimes the amount is linked to whether a transaction follows out of this referral. But Tomonori sees more monetization opportunities as the platform grows, especially as Pricebook will have access to valuable market data, such as which products are popular and which retailers have the best prices locally. Businesses may have use for that sort of data. “Because we are digging deep into various processes of buying and selling, we have many potential monetization points”, says Tomonori.

That said, Pricebook is already facing many competitors in Indonesia, among them PriceArea, Rocket Internet’s PricePanda, and Telunjuk. These competitors have deep pockets and possibly better positions in the market. PricePanda for one announced a new round of funding just earlier this month, on top of a US$3 million round in January 2014. At that time, it claimed to already have 70,000 products listed, though this is across Southeast Asia, not just Indonesia. PriceArea, Pricebook’s Indonesian competitor, claimed to have over 1.4 million monthly visits back in May 2014. This was around the same time when PriceArea got acquired by Korean company Yello Mobile, leading to the assumption that Yello Mobile/PriceArea is probably a step ahead with taking price comparison mobile.