Last Updated on July 16, 2014 by Tim
If you’re an online shopper, you probably know how it feels to encounter a discount on something you bought at full price days earlier. Your heart plummets. The self-loathing begins. Buyer’s remorse ensues.
Lucky for you, gone are the days of incessantly revisiting online stores to check whether prices have dropped. Price-watching apps do it for you now.
Pricify is one such price-watching tool that makes price-watching easy for online shoppers by downloading a browser extension that tracks prices on a shopper’s wishlist.
How it works
To use Pricify, shoppers need to sign up for an account and download its browser extension for Chrome. As users go about their usual online shopping, the extension
embeds pink “Watch Price” buttons below product prices on over 1400 participating e-commerce sites. Clicking on the button allows users to instantly add items to their account and Pricify begins monitoring for price drops immediately. Among the supported sites are: Amazon, Etsy, Sephora, Crate and Barrel, and Zara.
Shoppers are then notified any time items on their wishlists are discounted and can choose to receive notifications either via email or Facebook to instantly alert them when prices drop.
What about sites that don’t support Pricify? You can still watch prices on unsupported sites by simply clicking the browser extension’s icon to the right of Chrome’s address bar.
But Pricify is not even a year old – the public beta version launched in October 2013 – and it still needs work. For now, there is still no mobile app available (although it’s in the works), and it’s only compatible with Chrome.
Competition
In a market where mobile and tablet apps are key, many online shoppers will probably forego Pricify for one of its competitors that offers both desktop and mobile tools. One of the major players in price-watching, for instance, is New York-based Hukkster.
Hukkster has a better developed product discovery platform, works with all the major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Explorer and Safari) and has both a mobile and tablet iOS app. That said, some of its user-experience lags behind Pricify’s.
For instance, Hukkster doesn’t conveniently embed “Watch Price” buttons beneath product prices on its supported sites. Users must either use a bookmarklet or click on Hukkster’s extension icon in their browser’s toolbar to add prices to their watchlists. Maybe that’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s not as convenient and detracts from user experience.
But what might be a deal-breaker is Hukkster doesn’t allow users to watch prices on unsupported sites. Pricify’s ability to do this is a great competitive advantage.
Company
Co-founders Kiran Kumar and Ajay Mathew founded Pricify in September 2013. Kumar is the CEO and heads up strategy and marketing out of Sydney, Australia. Based out of Bangalore, India, Mathew is the CTO and runs the engineering and product development teams.
And not even a year after its public beta launch, the company is already receiving accolades. It was selected as one of 50 startups in Asia to participate at Echelon 2014 – the largest tech conference in the region. Pricify also won Most Promising Startup and the People’s Choice award at Echelon’s Australia’s 2014 Satellite event in May.
But amid all the back-patting and high-fives for such a great tool, shoppers should be aware that Pricify also recently launched a platform for e-commerce retailers called PricifyPRO. This service provides retailers with analytics and tools that allow them to better target online shoppers.
In this age of data-sharing and privacy concerns, many online shoppers won’t want any part of a service that uses their information like that. But others may see more targeted marketing as a favour – just one more way such tools are making their lives and shopping online a little easier.
