Minderest: a startup used to compare e-commerce prices
Minderest is a platform that tracks prices of a (physical) product on e-commerce websites. It has a web application for online stores and another mobile app for physical stores.
“We are a digital platform used to compare prices but we do not work with end customers, only companies. Whoever decides to use our services indicates in Minderest the prices of which online stores it wants to compare and pays for services rendered", explains Antonio Tomás, CEO and founder of Minderest.
The startup was created in 2012 following a previous project worked on by the company's founding partners, Antonio Tomás and Juan Sánchez, Technical Director. In this project they saw the need to compare prices in the e-commerce world and they thought that there was no suitable tool for this and decided to create Minderest.
Most of Minderest's clients are European; they are very successful in Germany in particular. The company's CEO explains that, "In principle we don't want to leave the European market, since working with another currency would complicate things a lot," and adds, "We don’t only compare prices but we also indicate product availability, which is valuable information for companies."
As for the operation, he explains, "It's something like what Google does. Minderest has web spiders that crawl the Internet, it launches them on pages of interest - those which the client has requested-, stores the information and compares prices with algorithms”
In terms of the mobile app, the Minderest CEO explains that, "What it does is compare prices in offline stores through a barcode reader. It's as simple as moving the cell phone up to the product label in question and the information will be stored."
Antonio Tomás has a curious anecdote that, "The name was chosen randomly, not for a particular meaning. One day a client of English origin congratulated us for the name, something that surprised us and we had not noticed, but separate it sounds like: Mind the rest which is great for a price comparison site."
The Minderest CEO also notes that, "With the rise of markets there are many companies that sell the same product, so the competition's pricing is really important and we make it possible to find that out easily."
Today with all the offers on the web, if you want to sell online it's essential to know the price of products"
According to Antonio Tomás who concludes: “If clients compare prices when buying, websites are logically going to do this when selling”.