Pricelizer on ‘cartcharging’: the future of e-commerce

Pricelizer has been making waves across Europe, and has built some tremendous momentum in the e-commerce industry since their founding in 2013.

After participating in the #Pitchdeck at the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg and presenting at the invite-only Next Conference in Hamburg, founder Karl Lillrud is quickly becoming a sought-after expert in e-commerce customer satisfaction.

They found success in the retail “niche” of online shopping. More than half of the shopping done today is over the internet.  Even though ‘digital’ shopping is not a tactile experience, a lot of us behave online in the same way as we do in real shops. We put things in our cart that we later decide not to buy, often because we decide the price is not an amount worth parting with for the item.

Pricelizer’s innovation is to be able to track price changes on an item you desire, and then notify you whenever it is changed, so you can buy the item at a lower price. This is a win-win for retailers and customers: retailers have less cart abandonment, and customers can have better deals. They call it “cartcharging”.

We caught up with Karl Lillrund to talk to him about why Pricelizer is the future of e-commerce.

Do you have any competitors or services that you would like to partner with?

In the area of re-attracting consumers back to stores there are multiple alternatives found, but what they offer is a solution based on a business point of view.  Our solution is built up from a consumers point of view, solving the problem of why consumers abandon their carts.  We named this new standard cartcharging.

I am sure that we will see many competitors trying to redesign their solutions now when it is so obvious how the earlier ones where not improving customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is the one most important thing for any business to scale in the new era of online business.

How do you get customers? Do you rely on paid advertisement or aim for word of mouth advertisement and publicity?

With our two solutions, the consumer solution and the merchant solution, we aim at having the consumers show what a great value our solution is for them making the choice to implement the free-to-use solution into any e-commerce site.

So you not only track the products prices but also help customers find bargains. How does bargaining work, is it like an auction? Is there a limited time offer for the consumers?

We do not offer bargains or discounts or codes or anything like that. What we do is to remove complexity and make it as logical as possible.

After going through a lot of research results and studies around customer behavior, online and cart abandonment there is clear mutual message: carts are abandoned in massive numbers – about 70% of all carts are abandoned -and out of those 70%,  the largest cause for this is due to the pricing.  As high as 40% of consumers abandon their carts only because of the price.

The logical solution to that is not to start sending out discount codes to all customers who abandon their carts as this will only damage your long term business. We solved this without damaging the business and with increased customer satisfaction!

By sending an email to the customer asking if they like to know when the price goes down, the customer gets a choice to know when the price goes down. We automatically create a monitoring profile with the products they abandoned in the cart. We then stay silent until any of the products drop in price, instead of pushing the customer to make a purchase or following the customer around online with targeted ads.

You and I, the consumers, want to have personalization and we want to make our own decisions. So when the public price on the website drops on any of the products you had in your cart, you will get an email and a simple button which you click on to be able to make that purchase on the product you are interested in at a new lower price.

Do you aim at certain type of e-commerce site, such as clothing or home appliances?

We aim at all e-commerce sites as we know that all e-commerce sites have the problem with abandoned carts and we know that all products will some day be replaced by a new one, a new version, color, model and so on. There is a end of life for the items sold in most stores and at that point there will be a price change.

Which is your preferable direction of development: B2B or B2C, or are they kind of going together and just two sides of one service?

They are going great together, and that is why we have chosen to offer a B2B and a B2C solution, in the end we are here to increase sales by making consumers happy. So for us its obvious to work on both sides.

 

To try cartcharging for yourself, visit Pricelizer, or if you are a business, check out their B2B version Revalizer.