iPrice is Southeast Asia’s leading platform helping shoppers find the best deals in the region’s messy eCommerce space. As it sought to help customers find products most relevant to them, iPrice entered into a partnership with Taran 4 years ago. The collaboration saw Taran utilizing its data science and machine learning expertise to build a proprietary sorting engine to help iPrice offer better product recommendations to its customers. After seamlessly integrating into existing products and systems, the recommendation engine helped iPrice maximize customer engagement and increase click-through rates by 20%.
iPrice – An eCommerce Powerhouse in Southeast Asia
As Southeast Asia’s leading eCommerce aggregator, iPrice allows consumers to compare the price of products across several platforms. Originating out of Malaysia, iPrice Group operates across seven of the region’s largest markets – Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
“While users know exactly what they want to buy, they often struggle to identify which sellers offer a fair price, are trustworthy, and have a reputation for great service. We simplify the user’s journey by tailoring a list of products from reputable sellers,” conveys the Co-founder of the Group and Chief Technology Officer Heinrich Wendel. The iPrice platform collects data from several eCommerce sites daily, averaging approximately 8 billion offers on different products. Accordingly, the platform needed a world-class algorithm to streamline the incoming data pipeline and crunch the numbers to provide visitors with the best products and offers.
The need for Data Science Experts on iPrice
iPrice has an enormous number of products listed across its digital catalogs. The platform required optimizing its ‘presentation bias’ and ‘position bias’ to improve customer click-through rate. Customers had to be offered the most relevant products and details to ensure maximum engagement. “However, given most shoppers in Southeast Asia’s rapidly growing e-commerce market are first-time customers, over 90% of the visits to iPrice are new customers – this limited the information we had on their preferences and spending patterns to create a functioning optimization algorithm,” Heinrich states. iPrice also needed to analyze ‘shown-but-not-clicked’ products to help enhance the products to be displayed on the first few pages.
How Taran’s data science expertise helped iPrice
To help iPrice’s customers find the items they’d like, Taran built a customized recommendation engine. It uses a state-of-the-art machine learning model to predict the popularity of products. Alongside this, Taran set up a robust and scalable data infrastructure to process vast volumes of data overnight. The end result was a proprietary sorting engine that offered better product recommendations, improving iPrice’s customer engagement identified by a 20% increase in click-through rates.
Moreover, Heinrich states that proactive monitoring by Taran helped provide innovative solutions to the minor bugs that emerged on the platform during the initial stages. “As one of Taran’s very first customers, iPrice has been working with them for years. Both teams share one mindset and culture that helps us work together organically. This has made the overall implementation of Taran very smooth and well connected on a technical level,” shares Heinrich. Through having a solid relationship, the teams were able to have engaging discussions that enabled Taran to understand the business context thoroughly and provide iPrice with the best possible solution.
The ongoing partnership between iPrice and Taran
The ongoing partnership with Taran has enabled the iPrice Group to keep up with evolving business requirements. A hallmark of this collaborative partnership is Taran’s flexibility, states Heinrich. The company has supported the iPrice team by remotely delivering innovative data solutions as well as through physical workshops in its Kuala Lumpur offices. From his long-standing experience in eCommerce, Heinrich endorses the competency of Taran as a true pioneer in the field of data science. “Working with Taran has been an enriching experience to iPrice as they are a super smart group of people who work very collaboratively and deliver the best solutions at all times.”