Our Latest Internet Investment: WinBuyer

We were pleased this week to officially announce Giza’s investment in WinBuyer, one of five investments we’ve made this year and the latest addition to Giza’s Internet portfolio.

WinBuyer is one of the most interesting Israeli companies working in the e-commerce space, and a leader in the new and growing field of Onsite Comparative Pricing (OCP). The company’s technology enables online retailers to bring comparison shopping to their own sites.

E-tailers running the WinBuyer solution can then display competitors’ prices for a specific product on that product page. Buyers get the benefit of the comparison shopping experience without having to jump back and forth to Google or to external comparison shopping sites.

“But why,” I can hear you shout already, “would any online merchant possibly want to display competitors’ prices on their own sites?” A legitimate question. The answer, counter-intuitively, is that by doing so they actually increase conversion to sale and average cart size.

OCP helps online retailers by increasing transparency and creating a greater sense of trustworthiness. And this works even if the retailer displays prices cheaper than his own. The WB application allows e-tailers to define how many results to show, and whether to lower prices from competitors as well as higher ones.

Psychologically, many consumers want to know that they are getting a fair deal rather than the absolute cheapest prices.

By increasing price transparency, WinBuyer’s solution can actually help e-tailers step back from an increasingly destructive spiral of price-cutting and help consumers focus on other aspects such as service and reliability.

And because e-tailers receive part of the affiliation fees if their users jump to one of their competitors’ sites from the WinBuyer widget, it also allows e-tailers to monetize part of the traffic they would have lost in any case.

Online retailers increase their revenues, users get a better e-commerce experience. A classic win/win.

To date, WinBuyer has deployed its solution on more than 200 sites. Most recently, Overstock.com, one of the major online retailers in the US, has adopted WinBuyer in many of its product categories including books and electronics.

WinBuyer is led by a terrific team, including Founder and President Miki Balin, CEO Dan Clarke, and Founder/VP R&D Alon Weinberg. We are looking forward to great things with these guys.