My name is Sergey Ryabov, I am a founder of Ahoolee – worldwide shopping search engine. We launched alpha-version of the service in May 2017, and carried out ICO presale, as a result of which we got $200 000 in 30 minutes. Ahoolee compares prices in all web-stores all over the world, shows price behavior history, and allows to pay for goods with crypto-currency.

How the idea was born.

The idea came to me in 2012. That year we launched Miiix – product matching service for big international marketplaces and retailers. In the course of work, I noticed that neither search engines, nor marketplaces solve the problem of search of goods and of purchase decision to a full degree.

Before buying something one pays attention to 2 factors:

  •         Price (the lowest one at the moment)
  •         Product’s benefits (product’s value in comparison to other goods with the same price/with lower prices)

Search engines are not tooled for this task. Google doesn’t give us the opportunity to compare products with different prices from different shops, it also doesn’t guarantee the availability of the product on a website, and all of this makes product search inconvenient.

AliExpress, Amazon, Yandex.Market and other marketplaces solve these problems, but:

  •         The range of stores is limited (often they are local ones)
  •         Cheap and low-margin goods are not uploaded to marketplaces
  •         Prices in marketplaces and stores often do not coincide
  •         Retailers have to upload goods to marketplaces all by themselves and they also have to adjust to technical specifications of a marketplace

What do we get as a result:

  •         Casio G-Shock DW-6900-1V watch on Yandex.Market costs $110, on Amazon – $50
  •         Another model –  Casio G-Shock (GST-W110D-1A) – vice versa in Russia costs cheaper, than on Amazon –  $266 against $310.

It means that in both cases one can pay less money for the watch if they implement the global approach to the search.

Our solution.

Ahoolee – global shopping search engine. The engine collects information on goods in web-stores all over the world, continuously reindex data and doesn’t require payment for placing. We don’t charge selling fees. That’s why retailers don’t have to hide cheap products from Ahoolee.

We combine identical goods to form a single flypage. On a flypage, a user can compare prices of different retailers, and see the price behavior history of any product in a certain store.  

Many of us faced a problem when sellers intentionally overprice goods before giving a discount, for instance on Black Friday. On Ahoolee everything is transparent – users see the price dynamics and the most attractive offers at the moment. We collect and hold data on every price change in Ahoolee blockchain.

Moreover, users can buy goods in online stores for cheaper prices using Ahoolee Tokens (AHT), which can be bought for any currency including crypto-currency. Now there are more than 40 million products from 1000 web-stores in Ahoolee database.

Avenues for Ahoolee:

  •         The problem of liquidity of crypto-currency opens the door for blockchain marketplace, where one can buy goods for crypto-currency. The number of unique crypto-currency holders according to Cambridge University estimations amounts to 3 to 6 million people. It has grown 4 times over the last 5 years, and it has a huge growth potential due to involving new countries and regions into mining, such as Russia, China, Western Europe etc.
  •         By 2020 the amount of e-commerce trade will equal 4 trillion dollars.  Marketplaces play an important role in e-commerce economy: for example, in the US 48% of buyers start their product search in marketplaces and spend more money there than in online-hypermarkets. In our opinion, Ahoolee can become a new round in marketplace and e-commerce trade development.
  •         A demand for “fair prices”: users will seek for a place where the data on stores, prices and price behavior is transparent.
  •         The project has already aroused interest and established credibility in many countries of the world: at the Ahoolee pre-sale, there were investors from Canada, Great Britain, many European countries and Russia of course.

Future perspectives:

By the end of 2017, we plan to increase the number of goods in our system by 1 billion and the number of stores by 50 000. The service will make money on contextual (search engine) advertising and premium-accounts with a subscription fee of 5000 dollars a year.

Premium account marks the shop out on a search page and guarantees that the seller is not a fraud. During the following year, we plan to sell not less than 1000 premium accounts as well as to bring in 1 million users to monetize the search advertising. For carrying out purchases within the engine we launch the mining of our own crypto-currency – Ahoolee Token (AHT) on the basis of our own blockchain. Furthermore, we intend to carry out a market launch in several countries simultaneously.  

For addressing these problems starting from the 28th of August up to 11th of September we hold ICO seed-round, planning to sell  25 million AHT (Ahoolee Tokens), in order to get a required sum of money for project development. Ahoolee Tokens, as it is mentioned above, can be used for buying goods.