Ecommerce search engine Pricesearcher has hired former Amazon UK Head of Pricing Weldon W. Whitener as Chief Analytics Officer.
They say he brings a deep knowledge and understanding of large data sets from his time serving under data scientist Dr Richard Durban at the Sanger Institute at the University of Cambridge. This experience was put to work in the retail sector after being headhunted from The Boston Consulting Group to work as Senior Product manager for Amazon, eventually becoming the Head of Pricing.
He says about his new appointment:
My time in the corporate sphere has been enlightening and rewarding in equal measure. But I have always harboured an entrepreneurial streak. I wanted to wait for the right opportunity. It was clear that there was a unique chance within Pricesearcher to build something unlike anything elsewhere in the market. To actually change the game.
My experience will add value for both retailers and customers that visit Pricesearcher. Sam and the team are taking their commitment to understanding how best we can serve both sides of the sector seriously.
For the consumer, we have a shared belief in the accessibility of data, and the responsibility to use this data to remove the barriers of entry for a consumer. Retail is the last sector to use an efficient price aggregator. If you look everywhere else – aviation, insurance, food, banking – consumers have all benefited from the democratising power of big data. My job is now to derive actionable insight from this massive data set and enable retailers to make more informed pricing decisions.
Applying a data science perspective to this mountain of pricing data has allowed us to understand better than anyone else exactly what the retailer ultimately wants, and how we can offer them a pricing strategy to achieve it.
– Weldon W. Whitener, CAO, Pricesearcher
