For e-commerce startups in MENA and all over the world, it is a conflicting time to do business- while the industry is thriving on the whole, the pressures of competition are perhaps at the highest levels and are indicative of a winner-takes-all scenario. Add to that the poor levels of customer loyalty in online shopping, and you have a difficult problem in your hand as an e-retailer. It is in such tough times that entrepreneur Hedi Zaher felt that it would serve e-commerce players well to do something about the large data mines they’re sitting on, and use the hard-to-define concept of big data to their advantage.
With this in mind, Zaher with co-founders Aymen Ferchichi and Oussama Messaoud launched Tunisia-based big data startup Datavora in late 2016 as an e-commerce monitoring service serving the information needs of a variety of stakeholders, such as brands, e-retailers, distributors, and market researchers. With a proprietary technology, the startup “crawls” websites and marketplaces to collect e-commerce data on a global scale, and analyzes and interprets results in real-time to aid decision-making. “Our aim is to be the Bloomberg of e-commerce: a trusted independent third party that collects data at a large scale and in real time, and makes it available for the different actors,” says Zaher, explaining Datavora’s ambitions.
And these ambitions of the entrepreneur got a boost recently, as just a few months into its launch Datavora has successfully closed a seed funding round of around TND1 million (approximately US$500,000) raised from investors including United Gulf Financial Services - North Africa (UGFS), two Tunisian investment funds, family, friends and employees as well. The company plans to use the funds primarily to enhance the quality of their technology and “equip customers with a competitive advantage through a unique value proposition.” Accordingly, a big share of the funds are set to be used for business development and customer adoption in target markets of Europe and North America. Datavora’s platform monitors e-commerce websites, distributors’ data, online marketplaces and brand portals, and provides its users details of product assortments, their exposure, displayed prices and other analytical reports on an easy-to-use dashboard view. The technology hence assists e-retailers in making key decisions by providing insights on price positioning for a given brand compared to the competition’s, major competitors for specific product lines, where product ...