Plug and Play’s CEO Corner: Arie Shpanya, Wiser

Plug and Play brings together retailers and start-ups that offer specific technology and expertise that can relieve merchants’ pain points. Chain Store Age’s Customer Disruption newsletter provides a Q&A with the CEO of one of those companies in each issue. This time, the spotlight is on Arie Shpanya of Wiser.



What does your company do?

Wiser is a dynamic pricing optimization engine that monitors, analyzes and reprices retail products in real time. With automated pricing and easy sync, it enables online retailers to optimize their revenue and profit and beat out their competition with the touch of a button.



Wiser’s suite of products offers solutions for the “nuts and bolts” of e-commerce, including pricing, merchandising, assortment, inventory planning and forecasting.



How do retailers leverage your solution?

At its core, Wiser qualifies a deep need within retail. Namely, the need to stay both competitive and profitable amidst a rapidly changing marketplace. Wiser not only arms retailers with pricing intelligence and repricing, but is also innovating on the cutting edge of e-commerce pricing.



Wiser empowers retailers with advanced tools such as assortment optimization, demand elasticity engines (multi-factor estimation and cross-product elasticity to name a few), and machine learning algorithms that maximize sales while maintaining margins.



Wiser partners with merchandisers, marketers, and buyers by empowering them with the necessary tools to build and sustain real business value.



What is your background as CEO and what led to the development of the company?

Wiser started with a problem I wanted to solve as a retailer. Back in the day, I used to be a retailer that sold online via online marketplaces and an online store. I had a need around monitoring competitors pricing on a daily basis in an efficient way. Otherwise, checking each item manually was tedious and time-consuming. That's when the idea of automating data collection was born and so we launched WisePricer, our MVP (minimal viable product) that later turned into Wiser- a complete merchandising engine for commerce.



The approach that worked out for us was "scratch your own itch" as we solved our own problem, hence we convinced ourselves as a company for retailers by retailers.