Pricebook raises third round of funding to provide O2O shopping services to Indonesians
The startup collects sales prices of various merchandise from both online and physical stores and list them on its portal
Pricebook CEO Tomonori Tsuji
Indonesian O2O shopping search engine Pricebook, a unit of Japan’s Pricebook Co., has closed its third round of funding, led by KLab Venture Partners with participation from Aucfan Co (both Japan).
The size of the deal was not disclosed.
With the new funds, Pricebook will further accelerate its expansion into various product categories and major cities outside of Jakarta, mainly in Southeast Asia.
Established in September 2013, Pricebook aims to solve the information asymmetry in Southeast Asia among consumers and businesses. It forayed into Indonesia as a gadget price comparison portal in December 2013.
As an O2O shopping search engine, Pricebook collects sales prices from both online and physical stores and list them on its portal. With a team of 20 people, it is focussed on merchandises such as mobile phones, computers and other electronic items to aggregate product specifics, reviews and prices from both online and offline shops.
The firm has partnered up with over 1,000 offline shops in Jakarta, Surabaya and Bandung, as well as ITC malls, the chain of country’s largest electronics shopping malls.
Tomonori Tsuji, CEO of Pricebook, said: “Though Indonesia’s commerce market is huge, the details differ largely from the advanced markets. Seeing businesses enter and quit, it is becoming clearer these days that many of the pure time-machine web media are not working in this market.”
“Pricebook now receives considerable amount of user traffic and all kinds of partnership requests from businesses interested in our unique O2O reach and customer quality. We will be opening up the doors for more collaboration opportunities to enable smart shopping and selling only achievable through Pricebook, aiming to become the Southeast Asia’s No.1 shopping/business portal soon,” he added.
In March last year, Pricebook raised an undisclosed amount of capital from IMJ Investment Partners, Global Brain Corporation, and Hiro Mashita, Founder and Director of M&S Partners.
In the developing Indonesian market, with the continuous income increase and the spread of new budget smartphones, the Internet population has reached 100 million in 2016. Rising shopping demand has brought on numbers of online marketplaces to enter, leading to fast growth in e-commerce and surrounding businesses.
However, the country’s main shopping channel remain by far offline due to price, trust, speed and other sensitive issues. The trouble with those offline transactions is, they are informationally asymmetrical and disconnected; no stakeholder – shopper, seller, manufacturer – have complete access to accurate & real-time distribution information, causing opportunity losses everywhere.
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