JOKR/DAKI Powers Online Grocery Sales with Dynamic Pricing 

Founded in 2021, JOKR/DAKI is an instant grocery and retail delivery platform at a hyper-local scale, making the supermarket shopping experience smarter, faster, and more enjoyable. When Alonso Avila Ibarra – Head of Pricing and Monetization – joined the company, he experienced firsthand the challenges of managing a high number of prices across multiple countries. To activate the company’s pricing strategy and optimize prices dynamically, he implemented Pricemoov’s AI-powered pricing platform.

Struggling to Activate an Agile Pricing Strategy

Like every online retailer or supermarket running on thin margins and fighting the impacts of inflation, JOKR/DAKI is focused on continuously optimizing prices. At any given time the company manages hundreds of thousands of prices, which need to take into account expiry dates, market demand, and competitor pricing.

Harnessing a combination of a centralized and decentralized pricing approach, JOKR established a strong foundation from the start. While a dedicated pricing team is accountable for determining the right pricing strategies, category managers are responsible for managing prices within their verticals. 

However, this is no small task when the data is managed and analyzed in spreadsheets. Take thousands of SKUs, over 100 stores plus promotional prices, and the complexity rapidly soars, resulting in thousands of combinations for each product. 

Spreadsheets frequently crashed due to the number of lines and complicated calculations. “Add competitor pricing data, and the complexity grows even further. Even without competitive data, it was very challenging to optimize and change prices on a daily and weekly basis,” Avila explains.

Limited Bandwidth to Optimize Prices

Avila’s first move to take JOKR/DAKI’s pricing practices to the next level was hiring a dedicated pricing analyst for each country where the company operates. The analysts were charged with executing and analyzing price changes to help the pricing team and category managers understand the impact of those changes. 

Even then, Avila recognized the limitations. “A small team of local analysts helped – such as ensuring our prices were aligned with the market – but they didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on 100% of our product assortment,” he continues. 

Seeking to Automate Price Changes

With business growing rapidly, Avila recognized the need for pricing automation. An internal project was kick-started to develop this capability in house. However, he quickly ran into challenges around data accuracy.

“We could implement basic pricing automation if we didn’t include competitor data. But it became incredibly challenging once that was added because we needed to ensure the data was accurate and up-to-date,” says Avila.

This realization kicked off the search for a pricing solution. Avila sought a provider that made it possible to combine data integrity with pricing automation. 

Finding the Right Dynamic Pricing Solution

With Pricemoov, JOKR/DAKI found a solution to centralize all pricing-related data and implement dynamic pricing in one platform. In addition to satisfying the company’s criteria for data and automation, Pricemoov’s flexibility stood out. “The solution enables us to easily change pricing rules and strategies as we see fit,” Avila says. 

Avila was equally impressed with how Pricemoov’s experts engaged with JOKR. Along with clearly explaining the power of the platform and how it could impact JOKR’s business, Pricemoov shared its product roadmap and stayed engaged. 

“We love that Pricemoov works collaboratively with its customers to continually evolve its platform. Plus, few vendors engaged with us at the level that Pricemoov did. We’ve also seen this commitment reflected in the onboarding process,” Avila explains. 

Achieving a Single Source of Truth for Pricing

To take advantage of all the possibilities enabled by the Pricemoov platform, JOKR started with defining pricing rules based on competitive data. These rules trigger intelligent price recommendations that can be automatically implemented, allowing JOKR to optimize prices dynamically. From there, JOKR will weave inventory and demand numbers into the calculation. “Pricemoov will help us achieve and maintain a mix of healthy margins and revenue – as well as competitiveness in the market,” says Avila.

The company also looks forward to the insights Pricemoov provides via price simulations. As business grows, JOKR/DAKI will continue to input more data and use Pricemoov to analyze the impact of price changes on margins, volumes, and demand. “We will be able to optimize prices in real time to move product by adjusting prices in line with demand,” he continues.  

As JOKR/DAKI phases out the use of spreadsheets and leverages the full power of Pricemoov, Avila anticipates the impact on the company’s pricing transformation. “Because Pricemoov is very user-friendly and provides all the right data, it will become our single source of truth for pricing,” Avila concludes.