Having signed a PriceCheck deal with MTN South Africa, Naspers is looking at signing with mobile operators in Nigeria.
In South Africa PriceCheck has 1.5 million users searching for products on its web and mobile sites (around 35 percent are on mobile). The site has over 30 million products in 6,000 categories from 400 stores.
“Our mobile app will be redesigned and co-branded as PriceCheck bought to you by MTN with nine radio buttons. One of these goes direct to MTN so that you can buy airtime and products. Less than 1 percent of retail happens online, yet as much as 40% of the buying decision process starts on mobile. We are now in a position to impact that crucial moment of influence. The future of commerce is on mobile and together with MTN, PriceCheck is closing the loop,” says MTN.
As part of the launch in South Africa, the app will be available across all MTN devices, and in app stores for Android, BlackBerry, Windows and iOS devices. The app will also be pre-loaded to the MTN Steppa device.
In Nigeria, PriceCheck has 200,000-300,000 users a year and has only been in operation for a year: “There we have double the traffic on mobile to what we have online. There’s 1 million products and we’ve targeted 200 stores, of which 100 have gone live.”
PriceCheck will be looking for both co-branding deals with operators and pre-loading deals with handset vendors in Nigeria.
They send traffic to the websites providing the products and get a small percentage of the order price.