Malaysia and Southeast Asia (SEA) faced lower inflation rates than many other parts of the world this summer. But consumers in the region still feel the pressure and search for the best prices and use discount codes whenever possible. This makes shopping sites like iPrice a valuable resource.
iPrice provides a centralized website where consumers across SE Asia can compare the prices of products, as well as research delivery time, shipping costs, payment options, and coupon deals.
Cris Tan, Partner Development Manager for SEA at impact.com, recently chatted with Rashik Sharar, Regional Partnership Manager at iPrice Group, to learn how iPrice meets consumer needs while generating performance-based revenue for its brand partners.
Cris: Can you tell us about the different kinds of tools and resources iPrice offers to consumers looking for products and deals?
Rashik: iPrice is SEA’s top ecommerce and lead generation platform, capturing 125 million yearly unique users across SEA’s seven key countries —Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Vietnam. We help users find the best deals amongst the world’s cluttered ecommerce market of 7 billion offers by helping users make calculated purchase decisions by providing them with the best offers, deals, and exclusive promos.
Cris: You have a unique relationship with New Straits Times Malaysia — can you tell us about that partnership and how each of you benefits from the relationship?
Rashik: New Straits Time (NST) is one of the four exclusive media partners we work with. We also have partnerships with Today Online in Singapore, Rappler in the Philippines, and Thairath in Thailand. Our partnership with NST allows us to extend the best deals and offer visibility to a wider audience by leveraging a different set of demographics from NST.
One of the benefits is that the users get access to an exclusive set of promos and offers that we list on the iPrice website. Our ecommerce partners get to utilize the different user base from our media partners by working with us. Finally, it benefits both iPrice and the media partner by increasing overall reach and offering visibility to the target audience.
Cris: What trends do you see in the SE Asia ecommerce market in terms of how consumers find products and discounts?
Rashik: We’re seeing consumers searching for product discounts for the products by either using search engines or going through sites that offer codes, deals, or vouchers.
For instance, if a customer is shopping on Platform A and wants to search for any additional promo codes that they are unable to find on the merchant’s page itself, they’ll google “Platform A promo code” and explore the top pages that ranked for that particular search result to see if those websites are with relevant codes that are applicable to their purchase. Another example is for customers to head straight to coupon websites like iPrice that are known for publishing these codes, deals, and vouchers to search for the relevant promotions.
Cris: How does your business use the impact.com platform? Do you rely on it primarily to find and connect to new brand partners, or is there more to it than that?
Rashik: Impact has continuously proven to be one of the top affiliate networks we work with. There’s definitely more than just finding and connecting new brand partners via Impact.
Impact platform has all the tools and features we need to work with a potential client. From finding the right brand, integrating their product feed with our platform, helping our clients with branding and flat fee placements, and tracking the client’s performance, everything can be done via the impact dashboard, which has been super easy and intuitive to use.
Cris: How many of your partners use the impact.com platform to manage their partnership with iPrice? What are the advantages of having them on the platform?
Rashik: From big marketplaces to smaller brands, many of our partners use impact.com as their main platform to work with us. We’ve noticed an increasing number of our existing clients shifting to the impact platform because of the reliable tracking and easy-to-use features.
Cris: You’ve said in the past that programs using impact.com seem to track better than others. Can you unpack that a bit?
Rashik: We noticed better tracking and stability on the impact.com platform compared to many others. For instance, impact has been very reliable in terms of getting updated feeds regularly.
Since we update our product catalog daily to ensure the best user experience, we need reliable and frequent product feed updates. Working with brands via impact allows us to get up-to-date feeds and ensures we are tracking the high-quality leads we send to our clients. Also, the impact platform provides a detailed performance breakdown of products and coupons with a single click. It’s very easy and convenient.
Cris: Trust plays a big role in your success and ability to drive high-converting customers to your partners. How do you build and maintain trust with your audiences and create a safe buying environment for them?
Rashik: Our mission at iPrice is to bring a greater level of transparency, convenience, and trust into SEA’s ecommerce. To do that, we need to ensure that the products and offers listed on our platform are legitimate. This means that whenever users come to our platform, they can find the best products via a well-curated product catalog and do a price comparison to find the best deal available from our partners. This results in a higher conversion rate among users and drives more high-quality leads to our partners.
Cris: What advantages does impact.com provide global companies like iPrice that work in multiple countries?
Rashik: One of the big advantages is connecting with global brands looking to grow their presence in SEA. With the help of Impact, it’s been easy to identify brands and connect them with the millions of users who visit iPrice on a monthly basis.
Cris: What’s your forecast for the Q4 shopping season in SE Asia and how are you accounting for that in your strategy? What’s ahead for iPrice in 2023?
Rashik: Q4 is the biggest shopping season in SEA, especially with double-digit campaigns such as 11.11 and 12.12 in the corner. Sales can go up to 10 to 12 times in a day during the 11.11 campaign and up to 7 times in a day during the 12.12 campaign. We also have Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as the Holiday season during Q4, where we see an increased number of online activities from our users.
Our clients have so much opportunity to tap into this season to increase their sales. We ensure that we have the best deals available on our website before the campaign or holiday begins. We also allow our partners to leverage different sponsored placements on iPrice and our media partner’s website to increase brand awareness and recall in the most competitive ecommerce season.
In 2023, we plan to double down our traffic and continue expanding our presence in SEA by continuously providing our users with the best deals available online.
If you want to work with great partners like iPrice, reach out to a growth technologist at grow@impact.com.
