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With a transparency database, the Federal Government of Austria wants to make it easier for consumers to search for cheap offers in retail. An announcement – how many. David Wurm, on the other hand, is one step further. The 21-year-old graduate of the HTL Perg has already implemented exactly what the politicians promised: his platform “preisrunter.at” compares the prices of the most important products on a daily basis and lists them. The user learns, for example, that the price of a certain chocolate has risen by 70 percent at one company, while elsewhere beef is 26 percent cheaper thanks to a campaign.
“I find it tragic that many people find it difficult to afford their daily shopping – in a country like Austria that is actually prosperous. That’s why I started my platform for comparing food prices,” says Pregartner about his initiative. On preisrunter.at, consumers can not only research current prices, but also follow the development of food prices. Price increases and price decreases are identified immediately. In addition, products can be compared directly with cheaper alternatives on a detail page. Filter functions such as “Price per unit” make it easier to compare prices for different quantities.
But that’s not all: All users can put together their own personal shopping cart on Wurm’s platform in order to keep an eye on their favorite products at all times. The shopping cart can be shared as a common shopping list with family members or roommates. Wurm is currently working on other functions, such as a price alert that proactively informs about a lower price or an offer. The civil servant has also taken on the task of merging individual product groups for a better overview.
David Wurm’s product search now includes more than 150,000 products from ten food retailers. The Mühlviertler also takes a look beyond the borders of Austria. “There is an integrated price comparison with shops from Germany, since they are also present here. This then shows how expensive many products are in Austria.”
When working on his price comparison database, he was particularly surprised by the dynamics with which prices go up and down in this country, says Wurm in the OÖN interview: “If a toothpaste suddenly costs twice as much from one day to the next, that’s remarkable.” The scope of preisrunter.at is particularly impressive given the age of its operator. But David Wurm already has a lot of experience in creating platforms: “I started my tech blog TechnikNews at the age of twelve and have since acquired a lot of know-how to develop such platforms and build a stable infrastructure behind them.”
Source: Nachrichten
