As Incubate coordinator and one of the core mentors throughout the Incubate startup accelerator program that ShopGrok recently completed, James Alexander has shared his final reflections on the latest Demo Day:
ShopGrok
What do they do: ShopGrok provides big retailers e.g. grocery stores with pricing data so they can determine when to lower (and raise) prices against their competitors.
What’s impressive about the founders: Aaron Cowper, the founder, is an expert in pricing. He worked in pricing at Woolworths and McKinsey where clients included retailers across Asia. This is a great example of a founder solving a problem they experienced while working in the industry.
Why is this globally important: It used to be, before Amazon, that pricing was something you might look once a month or so. But now with eCommerce pricing changes daily, and sometimes hourly, and there are no good online tech solutions for experts.
What did I learn:
- Pricing is an extraordinarily complex space. Take a simple store that might stock 1000 different items and will want to compare those ranges, prices and what their competitors are doing on a daily basis. There are no good ‘tech-first’ tools out there to do this yet.
- Amazon and Google have developed their own internal pricing analytic tools but retailers do not have access. Giving them a tool helps make the industry more competitive (better for you, the consumer).
- A lot of (expensive) pricing data offered by incumbent companies are out of date or highly skewed. An online world requires a different approach.
You can read James’ full post here