7 startups in Indonesia that help you compare prices online
Credit: PriceArea
Indonesia has seen its share of new startups popping up in 2013, with one of the hottest categories being price comparison search engines. These could play a crucial role in encouraging more people to start shopping online, thanks to the ease of comparing prices in between lots of e-stores.
Right now is perhaps the best time for any new price comparison engines to enter. Indonesia’s e-commerce era is just in its infancy, and will boom in the coming years. One report suggests that the country’s online transactions will hit $8 billion this year, and this number will grow to $25 billion in 2016 1 . This is one of the big waves the following price comparison engines are looking to ride on.
Here are seven notable players in Indonesia’s price comparison battlefield vying for the top spot:
1. PriceArea
PriceArea is arguably the first price comparison engine startup in Indonesia, and it’s arguably the current leader too. The company was beta launched in July 2010, and raised series A funding from GREE Ventures and Sony’s So-net last year after receiving seed funding from East Ventures 2 .
PriceArea currently has more than 20 categories of products for you to check the prices on, with a focus on phones, computers, baby and childcare products, cameras, and electronics. During Startup Asia Jakarta 2013, CEO Andry Suhaili revealed that it now lists over 3,000 online stores, covering more than 550,000 online sellers, and has 8.5 million products in its database.
The startup lets users search for products based on keywords, price, sellers, and the location of sellers. The company lists products from consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace sites too such as Tokopedia and BukaLapak. Those two sites alone must account for a huge portion of the products on PriceArea.
Alexa ranking: 414 in Indonesia.
2. Telunjuk
Telunjuk is another locally-made price comparison search engine. It was launched in March last year and is probably the only success story coming out of Indonesia’s first startup accelerator, Project Eden.
The site has 10 big product categories like sports items, beauty, electronics, fashion, and travel. Users can search products based on keywords, price range, product condition, location of sellers, and payment method. The site has about 160,000 products and 450,000 prices for users to find and compare.
Telunjuk lets users search products via an Android app or SMS. Users can also get notifications if there’s suitable price found on a product that a user has chosen to follow.
Alexa ranking: 679 in Indonesia.
3. PricePanda
Rocket Internet’s PricePanda was launched in Indonesia in May 2012. Global CEO Christian Schiller told us last month that while PricePanda has been the quieter one among Rocket Internet’s children in Southeast Asia, we’re going to hear more about it in the coming months. That’ll likely include an imminent launch in Thailand and a new regional office in Southeast Asia.
Users can search items on PricePanda based on keywords, and then sort it based on relevancy, price, and product name. The company, which caters to four other countries besides Indonesia, has a total of 20,000 products and 70,000 product prices in its database.
Schillers says that 50 percent of its Indonesian traffic comes from mobile devices, and this is where the company’s mobile apps for iOS and Android come in handy. PricePanda plans to launch Windows Phone and BlackBerry apps in the future.
Alexa ranking: 1,282 in Indonesia.
4. Priceza
Priceza, which expanded to Indonesia in September, hails from Thailand. The startup has been in operation since 2009, and is serving more than 3.8 million visitors per month. Priceza recently became CyberAgent Ventures’ first ever investment in Thailand.
The three biggest product categories on Priceza are IT and electronics, fashion and beauty, and stuff like herbal supplements. Besides typing in product keywords, users can search and compare products based on price range and sellers. Uniquely, it can recommend users to buy products from online sellers who have lots of ‘likes’ from your Facebook friends.
The startup has over 550,000 products in its database. Priceza is looking into the possibility of developing mobile apps for its Indonesian audience.
Alexa ranking: 1,513 in Indonesia.
5. PricePrice
The Indonesian version of Kakaku’s PricePrice launched in March this year. Kakaku itself is arguably one of the biggest price search engine companies in Asia, with 997 million users count as of November 2012.
PricePrice focuses on four product categories: computers, cameras, electronics, and phones. Users get to search and sort products based on number of views, price, and rating. Of course users can determine product price ranges as well.
PricePrice is not just the average price comparison site as it also acts as a C2C classifieds site. Users can login to PricePrice and immediately start selling their products – whether it’s new, old, or even grey-import items.
Alexa ranking: 2,317 in Indonesia.
6. IndoKatalog
This is the youngest price comparison startup in this list as it launched just a couple of days ago. IndoKatalog is built by Yogyakarta-based Drupal outsourcing company Skyshi.
IndoKatalog has nine main product categories which include fashion, electronics, car-related items, hobbies, and discounts. Users get to search products based on price range, sellers, and their location. IndoKatalog only lists items from trusted online shops. These shops are deemed trusted when they are verified by e-commerce providers like Jejualan and JagoanStore as well as by local e-commerce verification systems such as Polisi Online and CekStore.
Currently IndoKatalog has 182,000 products listed from 323 online shops. Prior to this, the Skyshi team built another price comparison site called Inkuiri. The latter has been morphed into IndoKatalog due to its different strategy – and to have a better name.
Alexa ranking: 10,020 in Indonesia.
7. Pricebook
Launched last week, Pricebook is another new player popping up this month. It arrives in Indonesia fresh with $150,000 seed capital from Incubate Fund and looks to challenge the current market leaders.
Pricebook’s four main categories are phones, computers, cameras, and electronics. Besides prices, the startup helps users make the best buying choices by dishing out other information like product ratings, reviews, and even forum threads for each product.
Right now Pricebook lists 6,000 products with 10,000 prices from about 30 online shops. The team plans to launch smartphone apps in the future.
Alexa ranking: 14,142 in Indonesia.
(Editing by Steven Millward and Terence Lee)
That’s just on business-to-consumer (B2C) e-stores, not including consumer-to-consumer selling online.
East Ventures invests in PriceArea and Tech in Asia. See our ethics page for more information.
This post was originally published on our new Indonesian site Tech in Asia ID, which you should totally bookmark and follow on Twitter and Facebook now.
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