Today we have selected Victor Ponkratov to take his interview. He is the CEO and Founder of Competitor Price Monitoring Service uXprice.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the growth of the e-commerce segment, having forced to go online even those offline sellers who hadn’t planned to do that. Since we work with online retailers, this time for our customers may be characterized as a time of increased competition on the market.
On the other hand, the loss of stability has changed the buyers as well. They have become more rational when choosing goods and sellers. It stimulates retailers to develop. So, since the pandemic, we have noticed the growth of several users, and these rates are increasing even these days.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded this company?
An idea of creating a service for competitor pricing monitoring and analysis arose a long time ago, about ten years ago. It happened when I was working on an e-commerce project. One day, our sales manager by mistake ordered 10x more products than we needed, so I decided to make a revaluation of goods.
I’m against dumping, but I found that they were too overcharged after analyzing the competitors’ prices. You may imagine my amazement when the goods after revaluation that should have been sold within one and a half years were sold within 1-2 months. That is how an accidental mistake of an employee significantly increased our profits, and I had an idea to create a service for comparing competitors’ prices and goods’ revaluation.
I had been working in the e-commerce and marketing field all my life, but a chance to implement this project did not appear right away. But before that, I had to evaluate the existing solutions on the market and was disappointed. So probably, the last fact became a crucial one for creating uXprice.
How does your company innovate?
uXprice works on a self-service principle: simple connection and easy use. This is also our advantage — users opt for a clear and practical solution as our primary task is to increase the income of our customers.
Talking about innovations, we’re working in two directions right now. Firstly, it is the expansion of functionality. We have dozens of global ideas and hundreds of tiny subtasks on uXprice development. I suppose this is how it always will be since the online market is very dynamic.
Our second direction complements the first one – we constantly improve the usability of our service. It is essential to offer a new possibility and implement it the way it was clear, even for a kid. And, indeed, we always listen to our clients.
We offer flexible solutions for competitor price monitoring and revaluation of your products so that each customer can benefit from them.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
As I’ve said before, the COVID-19 pandemic has positively affected the development of uXprice. The growth rate of our customers encourages us all this time. On the other hand, our present customers continue working with us, which is the highest evaluation of our company.
Many companies suffered from the pandemic, and we are always ready to meet them halfway. A lot of new users come to us after facing some difficulties. And we are happy that our solutions help them to get back on their feet.
As for the team, we continue working in the office following the necessary security measures. However, in my opinion, an opportunity to discuss the ideas or their implementation in person makes the work far more productive and the team — more united.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
It wasn’t easy to choose between work in the office and online. After our employee had received the first positive COVID test result, I barely slept that night. We were preparing, but still, it was unexpected. Fortunately, the measures taken were enough to prevent further infections in the team. The timely self-isolation allowed us to continue the work in normal mode.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
I face any difficulties as a challenge and try to find new opportunities in them. As the number of customers grows, so does my team. This isn’t my first business, so all the working processes were well established before the pandemic.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
There is competition on the market, but it’s not significant. This is because we try to make each stage of a user-service interaction simpler and better than our competitors do. So, for instance, it takes five minutes to connect the service, and it doesn’t require any help from the developer’s side. Also, our service has an option not only to add competitors independently but also to turn on the possibility of their automatic search by AI-based algorithms. And so it goes with each stage.
That is why uXprice compares favorably with the cost and convenience for users. We continue working in this direction and listen to the needs of our customers.
Your final thoughts
uXprice makes the competitor price monitoring and analysis affordable and straightforward for every retailer. Go to the website and register to receive free testing of the service!
- Spokesperson: Victor Ponkratov (CEO)
- Company: uXprice
- Website link: https://uxprice.com/
