Pricemania Case Study

What is Pricemania

• Pricemania is an e-commerce portal that brings together information about the prices in online stores and their quality, so that we can make better decisions when shopping online.
• Pricemania originated in 2007 as the idea of the founder Michal Král, who used similar systems for purchases as a student during work-study stays in the USA in 2002-2004. A few years later, a similar need arose in Slovakia, where the market of online stores was growing rapidly and it got increasingly difficult for shoppers to choose not only the best sellers when it comes to price, but mainly high-quality and honest stores.
• It saves shoppers a lot of time and money. Every day, several million products from the range of more than 10,000 Slovak and hundreds of Czech e-shops are updated on the portal. In the range you’ll find practically all the biggest sellers on the market.

In this case study, you'll find out:

• Why the client chose to completely overhaul the application in 2019,
• what the Pricemania Content Network is and how it operates,
• and how it assists in engaging customers in the initial phases of the buying process.

Technological debt

Pricemania has been operating continuously for over 14 years. And like any other e-commerce project that works with the software, it needs to be significantly updated. There were several reasons for the changes.

"In recent years, technological debt has accumulated significantly and so we have not been able to innovate fast enough and be competitive. That’s why in 2019 came the fundamental decision to rewrite the entire application from scratch and gradually replace the old system with a new generation of Pricemania." - Michal Král.

We gradually rewrote the API and other key modules and services for the partner. After rebuilding the core, we are able to develop new functions much faster and the whole system is more sustainable and our partner has better control over it.

Pricemania Content Network

At the same time, we have developed an innovative and functional connection that helps customers decide in a new way when it comes to buying products.

"Imagine that you’re reading an article about the latest iPhone or smart watch and directly in the review or test, you can compare the prices on leading e-shops such as Alza.sk, Mall.sk and others, and go to the e-shop directly from the article with one click. It saves time for the user, they don’t have to go to the price comparing site later and with a click they go directly to the e-shop where they can complete the purchase." - Michal Král

For e-shops, this means a significant increase in the reach of their campaigns and this way they are able to reach potential customers as early as in the product selection phase.

How it all works

It’s a network of high-quality partner content portals that display Pricemania widgets directly in their articles, comparing the prices of a given product. Widget data is extracted completely from the Pricemania platform.

"Currently, more than 3,000 widgets are already online on the sites of 20 leading publishers. The network includes expert websites such as Techbox.sk, Mojandroid.sk, TouchIT.sk, Nextech.sk, Fony.sk, but also several websites from the media groups Ringier Axel Springer or Zoznam, and the list of publishers is constantly expanding." - Michal Král

Partner network means a major extension of the existing business model of Pricemania. Thanks to it, our partner gets the service to many times more users.

Source: www.noviny.sk

Client's perspective?

In Pricemania, we faced a difficult decision in 2018 about how to proceed with our application, as the technological debt has grown significantly over the years and the state of the application didn’t allow us to grow and expand aggressively, rather we were spinning in a vicious circle. After a comprehensive audit by Bart, together we made a strategic decision to gradually rewrite the entire application from scratch to gradually replace the individual modules. Although this process is still ongoing, it’s already clear that this decision was the right one and thanks to that, we are able to develop much faster and better, and thanks to this we are growing by more than 80% year on year, we have launched a new business line Pricemania Content Network and we are beginning to launch an international expansion. On the part of Bart, I appreciate that they were able to comprehensively design the entire application and at the same time gradually implement the entire design, with very good communication and friendly cooperation.

Michal Král

Chief Executive Officer