In Turkey, there is a new service which hasn’t been doing a lot of PR, but it’s developing into something pretty interesting. AkAkce.com is fast becoming the nation’s price comparison market of choice. Koray Karatas, co-founder of the company, says the new features of Ankara based AkAkce have resulted from combining its online comparison model with the data acquired from offline environments.
With an average of 60,000 users daily, AkAkce is still the market leader ahead of Cimri.com. The company, which retrieves price information from 127 different stores and has recently started to collect data from inserts, ads and booklets of companies and brands in addition to the prices in online stores.
Thus, when listing the numbers from various e-trade web sites in product searches, AkAkce also uses prices “for information purposes” from “other places”, e.g. “Price from 17-30 July catalog of Real store” in this section. So it’s competing with print catalogues as well. Here’s an example for the Nokia 6303.
All in all, Turkey’s ecommerce market is powering ahead as the country rapidly develops – mirroring the development of more online markets further West over the last ten years which moved rapidly from ecommerce to media style online services. AkAkce, founded in 2000, is clearly powering ahead.