Gerhard Engel is the founder of Price!pinx. This is an online shopping service that offers product price drop alerts to shoppers interested in any type of products, from beauty to electronics.
The company is privately funded and its revenue comes from affiliate programs.
See what Gerhard has to say about his company’s business model, competition and more.
- How did you choose your company’s business model?
Our online shopping service is free and will always remain free. Users should not and will not pay for such a service even though it is valuable and saves money. We want to continue to grow our user base which truly determines the value of our company.
- Your site appeals to all types of online shoppers interested in all types of products. However, many business and marketing specialists claim that focusing on a niche is better than trying to cater to “everyone and their dog.” What do you think?
Yes, Price!pinx can be used by any type of online shopper since we monitor prices on any site for electronics, fashion items, real estate houses, and everything else. But you are correct, from a marketing perspective we focus on different profiles: men that buy gadgets, women shopping for shoes, bags, and dresses, etc.
All groups have one thing in common: they want to get the lowest price and save money.
- How does the current crisis affect your business (if at all)?
We believe that more and more shoppers are finally becoming more price conscious. They know what they want or need but have more patience and don’t buy products at regular price anymore. They want to be the first to know when the price of products they want to buy drops and need to use a service like Price!pinx.
- How do you promote your website?
The best way of spreading the word about our free service is to encourage our existing users to share the savings with friends and family. But of course we also promote our site among bloggers and media editors.
- Why should consumers use Price!pinx and not a competitor’s services?
Our powerful price monitoring engine monitors the price of a product on the actual retailer’s website many times each day. We support any shopping website worldwide.
All competitors rely on product and price feeds from retailers and therefore they can only support a small set of retail sites that have such feeds. They only detect price drops when the retailers actually inform them.
To use Price!pinx online shoppers do not need to change their shopping habits whatsoever. Our main tool is an easy-to-use bookmarklet. All you need to do is shop online as you normally would, highlight the prices of the products you want, and click the Price!pinx bookmarklet.
- Where do you see your business in 5 years?
Our main focus right now is to increase the user base. But we also have many more exciting features on our product roadmap that will allow smart shoppers to get even better deals.
Gerhard, thank you very much for your answers!
