How a Nobel Prize in economics could help you find a well priced pair of Adidas Sambas
Melbourne / Australia
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Melbourne / Australia 〰️
TL;DR: Ever felt the sting of buying something online, only to find it cheaper elsewhere days later? Two Stanford economists won a Nobel Prize for understanding auction fairness, and inspired Zipcart—a new app that means you’ll never have miss out on the best deal again.
So what? Think Google, but exclusively for shopping and in real-time. No more hours of price comparison; just the most affordable global price for any product. From Gucci to Apple, Zipcart promises to revolutionise your online shopping experience and ensure price democracy for shoppers.
It’s 2020. We’re all stuck at home, scrolling endlessly through online stores for brief respite from reality, trying to find the best deals on athleisure wear, sneakers and weighted blankets.
In Stockholm, Sweden two Stanford economists Robert Wilson and Paul Milgrom are awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, for solving a complex problem on the fairness of auction systems.
On the other side of the world in Australia, Amir Akhrif, a user experience and product designer who worked in the early days of online shopping and graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science wonders—how could I apply Wilson and Milgrom’s economic discovery, to level the playing field for every-day people shopping online?
Enter Zipcart—a new app that takes award winning economic theory and translates it into a seamless shopping experience that means fashion girlies like me can find a reasonably priced pair of Adidas Sambas from anywhere in the world in one simple application, without wasting time comparing prices from multiple online stores.
At Melbourne Fashion Week, Akhrif shared how he’s building Zipcart and why it’s worth joining the waitlist for what’s set to be the next disruptor in online shopping.
Martin Grant runway by Christine on Collins. Image: Bella Loke, Melbourne Fashion Week.
NV: OK let’s start at the beginning—how did a Nobel Prize in economics inspire Zipcart?
AA: Wilson and Milgrom thought that auctions were inherently unfair because they often favoured bidders with more information or experience. If a bidder has more information about an item, such as its true or competitive value and how much something might be in demand, they will be able to bid more aggressively and win the auction more often.
This got me thinking… could I apply this ‘information’ bias/unfairness to the everyday world of buying clothing, electronics and other consumer products, and reverse it? Afterall, how many times do we each spend hours looking for a particular product online at the best price, only to find it cheaper just a week after we already bought it?
Wilson (left) and Milgrom were awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Image: Andrew Brodhead, Stanford News.
I can relate to that experience on a visceral level. So how does Zipcart solve the problem?
Zipcart is at its depths a product search engine, or more specifically, a consumer search engine. We index hundreds of thousands of online stores and hundreds of millions of products, from designer brands and leading manufacturers. We then use sophisticated algorithms and a little bit of AI to organise, categorise and classify individual product’s information between competing stores. So we can build a giant internet-wide Product Graph of things.
How is that different to looking for clothes, shoes or electronics through traditional search engines like Google or Bing?
Google is great for searching fact-based information. But anyone who owns a shopping website, whether they work in technology or in retail, knows that Google’s indexing of sites can be painfully slow. It can take days, weeks or months to update your listed page information. That’s not ideal if you’re a retail store with a flash sale. Equally, that’s not great if you’re a consumer using Google to try to find a good deal on a pair of Nike Air Max, when the price has just changed on Foot Locker.
Zipcart intends to index price changes in near realtime using our proprietary crowdsourced search crawler technology, and alert any user who is following that product of changes.
Nike Air Max. Image: Unsplash.
So what does that mean for people like me who would use your product?
It means, Zipcart can finally offer our users the holy grail of consumer information: “the absolute cheapest online price for any consumer product they want”. Because we crawl so many stores and organise such large amounts of data, what we are aiming to do is create price democracy in the market, and we do this by solving the ‘information’ problem that Wilson and Milgrom highlighted as unfair.
One thing I like is how Zipcart offers consumer detailed price history information on any product. So, let’s say you’re browsing a particular perfume at a specific store via the Zipcart app; not only will we tell you if it’s available cheaper and where, but we’ll also show you its price history from the data we’ve previously collected. So you can see whether they’ve just jacked up prices, or whether they’ve just slashed prices. That’s just one of those neat little features to help a consumer decide whether one is the right time to buy or not. Oh, and you can buy any product on any of these stores, directly in the app, so no more flipping between stores in your browser or apps on your phone.
Why did you want to build Zipcart?
I built Zipcart, because I became frustrated with what I call ‘the starting-point experience’ for online shopping.
There are some great online stores out there, like The Iconic or ASOS who I greatly admire. And sometimes, we just go directly to great stores, without a concern of whether they are the best value or not. But for most of us, the starting point for ‘the shop’ always seems like a need to use Google. Don’t get me wrong, Google is a fantastic search engine for almost everything, and Zipcart is built with the help of Google’s amazing cloud infrastructure. But it’s just not very helpful for shopping. I would find myself spending hours searching for a product, clicking into a website, going back to Google, clicking on another website until I was satisfied I had found the genuine product I wanted at the cheapest price I could find.
I’ve personally been fascinated with building online shopping experiences for consumers since the late 1990’s, and have worked with leading fashion brands like Ted Baker and Laura Ashley, and retail giants like Tesco. Design, development and how people buy stuff is in my blood.
Do you have a goal in mind for the app?
Zipcart has the aim to become “The Internet’s Storefront”. That sounds a little grandiose and vague, I know, but what it means to me is that in the same way you start your internet browsing journey on Google, I want consumers to start their shopping journey on Zipcart. We want to give every consumer the best possible price on the internet, always. No gimmicks. No fudging of search results to meet bigger profit targets. Just consumer information direct to the consumer. That is what we are calling price democracy.
Did you know that 9 out of 10 internet users have used Amazon just to check the cheapest price of something, and whether they could get it cheaper on Amazon? But considering Amazon is just 1 of the 500,000 stores we index, Zipcart has a better view of the online shopping world from a price perspective.
How is Zipcart different to fashion or retail marketplaces like The Iconic, Amazon or Netaporter?
I believe that digital experiences still mirror physical analogies. Particularly when it comes to online shopping. Having been a part of the early grooming of that biggest fashion brands’ mail order catalogues in the late 1990’s into modern ecommerce age, nothing has intellectually changed. We just order online from a catalogue of pictures, instead of a printed catalogue. Same payment mechanism, same delivery mechanism. But it makes us feel less futuristic, if we say we ordered it on a mail order catalgoue.
OK so I’m a customer with a framework for how I like to shop. Help me understand how Zipcart fits into all the options I have available to me?
As consumers, we understand brand stores of individual brand/manufacturers where brands are the creators, manufacturers and retailers all as one experience with a stable recommended retail price (RRP) apple.com, nike.com, or balenciaga.com. We also understand retail stores of other brands where official RRPs may be discounted like footlocker.com, jbhifi.com.au, theiconic.com.au, kogan.com.au, or asos.com.
As consumers, we also understand the concept of department stores or marketplaces as single store emporiums, with branded concession stands of brands/retailers like Amazon, Selfridges, David Jones, Harvey Nichols or Harrods, where we buy through the checkout of the department store with a receipt branded with the department store or marketplace’s brand identity. And lastly, as consumers we understand shopping malls—a collection of branded stores and retail stores and department stores/marketplaces, in one convenient physical location.
Zipcart isn’t any of them. I would like you to think of us as the surveyor of the entire city in which all of those types of stores are located. Our web indexing crawls every road and every store, regardless of whether it is a branded, retail, departmental or a marketplace type of store.
If Zipcart were a physical analogy, we would be a thousands strong army of individuals photographing, reviewing and price checking every single product, in every single store in that city. And then distill it into a single product catalogue that our users could search and buy from, in the comfort of wherever they are.
A meta-product catalogue of product catalogues.
Left to right—Harrods in London, Apple in Singapore, Mall of Berlin in Germany, and Nike in New York. Images: Unsplash.
That sounds insane, and useful. Is there anyone else who’s done something similar?
There are two companies that have provided a similar conceptual experience. Google and Uber. Google put a wide net over the Internet and trawled its information to categorise and order it.
Uber put a similar grid over every city to provide real time logistical information, first for taxis, then for food, but eventually for any other logistical need (couriers, postage, etc).
We are casting that same wide informational grid/net over every purchasable product in the world. We’re not focused on the warehousing, sales and distribution of those products like a traditional store. Zipcart is focused on building an integrated experience of how we find products and buy them, in a single app.
What are some of the brands customers can find through Zipcart?
Every brand. Eventually. Afterall, we want to be the “The Internet’s Storefront”, and we index everyone; large and small.
At launch, we’ll be focusing on a few thousand of the most sought after and popular brands from fashion, lifestyle and consumer electronics categories. So you’ll be able to buy high end brands Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Gucci, Versace, Armani and all of the rest, alongside Nike, Adidas, Lululemon and other high street brands.
You’ll also be able to find a great range of consumer electronics manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, Dyson, Bose, Beats, Sonos, the list goes on.
Roughly how many products in the Zipcart catalogue will that be?
Even though we’re scaling, chances are if you can think of the brand, we’ll have their products in our catalogue. We did a test crawl last week of a full list of 700,000+ stores, which is about 0.35% of the entire active Internet. And the output was enormous. Almost 1.15 Billion products for sale from 100,000+ individual brands.
To put the data into context, Nike.com has 4,000-ish products listed on their own website inventory. Zipcart has around 80,000 Nike products for sale. So finding something you want, in stock, in the right size/colour, and at the cheapest possible price available online, isn’t ever going to be a problem for our users.
You mentioned “price democracy” earlier—what does that mean?
Zipcart is pro-brand, and pro-designer, but most importantly it is pro-consumer. Zipcart exists for price democracy in consumer fashion and consumer electronics. Put down to its lowest common denominator, the exact thing you want for the best possible price you can get in the World, because Zipcart has crawled every price available.”
Image: Zipcart
Can you tell us something about Zipcart that customers might find specifically interesting, unique, or useful?
At launch, our product library will contain more products than are available on both Amazon and Shopify.
Shopping isn’t just about online. Around 80% of physical shoppers have used the internet to do a quick price check before purchasing in a real world store. Our search allows users to do that easier with keyword and barcode search. We’ll even pop up a map, to show them cheaper prices within walking distance if the user is really keen on buying the product they want while they're out and about.
What are you personally most looking forward to buying on Zipcart?
A new iPhone. I always seem to buy my phones just before the next major hardware release. This time around, I want to use Zipcart’s product insights to tell me how many days there are between iPhone updates and where we are in that cycle, so I know if I should hold off for a little while for the new version.
Zipcart is an app that compares prices from over 500,000 stores to help users find the cheapest price for any product.
Sign up for early access to Zipcart at zipcart.app
