CBA-backed Little Birdie has launched a new browser extension, capable of searching and tracking the prices of millions of products online.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia invested $30 million into the ecommerce fintech back in 2021, before it even officially launched, allowing the bank to integrate selected shopping content into its own app.
Under the deal, Little Birdie was also granted access to over 6.5 million Commonwealth Bank app users for its retail and brand partners.
With the new browser extension, users can run Little Birdie on iPhones via the Safari browser and on desktops through the Chrome browser.
While the user is browsing, the Little Birdie extension shows them pricing for the same product by other retailers, without needing to leave the store’s product page.
It can also display a price history graph of items.
Little Birdie CEO Jon Beros told iTnews that “from a consumer perspective, there's never been a place where you can easily find an unbiased comparison view of what's happening in the world of retail”.
“There's a lot of transparency out there about what's a good price, what isn't a good price [and] retailers are changing prices all the time. Sometimes prices for a product can change three, four times a day," Beros said.
Beros said that relying on the likes of Google could be “really skewed towards adverts that are going to potentially lead you in the wrong direction” - "particular retailers are prioritised in [Google] search based on how much they spend on advertising", the company said in a statement.
He said Little Birdie had worked to refine the ability of the extension to identify products and provide context-aware recommendations based on what the user is currently browsing.
To do that, Little Birdie is processing "huge amounts of data from thousands of different retailers," a lot of it unstructured.
“It really comes down to being able to source the [best] quality of data you can which helps train the models," Beros said.
“That really is the backbone of generating great AI and machine learning models and essentially, we've been developing [that] since we started Little Birdie”.
He added that “all retailers have been doing it tough”, with Little Birdie aiming to “show a level playing field so it's not just the majors … getting the market share”.
“We kind of see our job as being that unbiased intermediary that connects consumers with retailers," he said.
The next steps for the fintech entail expansion with “great ambitions to obviously grow the product across Australia, but also internationally.”
