We are seeking an awesome competitive price monitoring app that would be natively integrated into Lokad. Our goal is to offer a 1-click solution to Lokad-powered merchants to allow them to obtain their competitors’ prices.

If you happen to know such a solution that you would like to see implemented in Lokad, don’t hesitate to forward this post to a relevant contact. If you happen to work in such a company, well, read on.

A bit of context

Lokad specializes in helping merchants to improve their prices and their stocks, the two challenges being fairly entangled in practice. In order to do this, we leverage advanced predictive analytics, packaged in a way that make them accessible even to very small companies.

What we don’t do, however, is to retrieve prices from competitors by directly crawling the web. Thus, many of our clients sent us their competitors’ price data that they obtain from other software companies. Since competitive intelligence is a basic need in commerce, Lokad is ought to provide something better than Bring Your Own Data. However, it turns out that crawling the web is a very specific challenge: our existing technology would not help one bit.

As there are dozens of price monitoring solutions out there, let’s not reinvent the wheel. We would like to integrate one of these apps, the best we can find, into our existing solution so that competitive intelligence becomes a 1-click upgrade at Lokad.

Properties of the partnership

The partner gets a super-qualified sales channel: the Lokad user base. Other data challenges have already been taken care of, and prices are ready to be consumed.

The price monitoring app is an option available to all our users; and Lokad actively promotes this option not only on our website, but directly on our own app as well.

We don’t expect this service to be free. We don’t plan to interfere with what you, as a partner, charge our mutual clients either. Finally, we are not asking for revenue share.

The DNA of our awesome partner

We seek an awesome price monitoring app. Naturally, it would be in SaaS mode and subscription-based, but we feel it should also have the following properties:

  • Free trial: technology is sufficiently automated to open up the possibility of free trials. For us, the absence of a free trial is a clear indication of consultingware solutions where the provider starts coding the day a client signs up for the service.
  • Focus on scale: just about any coder can hack a price scrapping bot in a week targeting a small ecommerce; however, this does not scale. Our “dream” user experience: a merchant asks for “contoso.com” and more than a year of prices is already available; then, the merchant asks for a comparison with “frabrikam.com”, and within 60 minutes, the full comparative price list is compiled and ready for download.
  • API: we are looking for 1-click integrations, well maybe a bit more than 1-click, but it has to be dead simple. Thus, Lokad needs to be able to programmatically interact with the app so that our users don’t have to deal with integration technicalities themselves. If no API exists yet, we expect our partner to provide an API when we start working together.

We are seeking a partner that thinks of their company as the (future) Google but for price search. If you are interested (or know someone who might be), drop us an email at contact@lokad.com.