A look at the deals market
Quick facts about Indian e-tailing market.
- Market was worth Rs. 1,105 crore in 2007-08 (Report – Internet and Mobile Association of India)
- Industry experts feel that Indian Consumers’ confidence in Online shopping is improving thanks to e-ticketing and online bill payment services.
- For major players like Indiaplaza, Rediff – consumer electronics segment is the biggest.
Now lets take a look at how this ecosystem appears from Indian context.
At the centre, we have the core players or the typical e-tailers that people talk about/use often. We have quite a number of startups like flipkart, storrz, autsun, MyKidsArena in this space.
Lets quickly run through other contributors in this ecosystem.
- Meta search engines – oxyshopping. Typically these players bombard you with a number of search results for any category and makes you get confused totally during your shopping research!
- Comparison Shopping – Players like Spoteazy, who allow you to compare and choose the product you want by showing things like Ratings, Aggregated reviews (some nlp stuff). Few target the US market too.
- Online Deals – No side by side comparison, features nothing. Just pure price. You should have done your research using the players on top and keep watching these sites for the lowest price. Get alerts by email, sms, phone, parrot etc.
- Community based – At last, share your research with others. Ask questions and figure out the best product suiting your needs using sites like MyProdoktSpace, ShoppingShouts
It is very essential that each of these categories co-exist for the core e-tailing market to expand.
In this post, we will focus on the Indian Startups in the Online deals space alone.
We will begin with AllIndiaDeals. Why this startup first? Because a google search for “deals” in google.co.in brings up this site on top. Started by a female entrepreneur Nidhi Modi, allindiadeals searches major e-tailers and travel sites for deals. Slick UI + Easy navigation definitely gives a good impression about this .Net powered site. (Related Read: Criticat – A startup by another female entrepreneur Swetha)
Next comes dealmaadi. They are slightly more popular than the rest, thanks to the UI which makes it more community-driven and also to other startups like dilsebol (Review), which constantly submits their own discounts here. Deal Maadi definitely makes you enjoy (Enjoy Maadi)
Singdeals formerly EaZyShoppinG.com, claims to be India’s first Shopping search engine and deals site. A quick look at the website convinces me with this fact. Yes, the site looks very early 2000ish and needs an upgrade!
Lastly onlinedeals.in. I hope the domain name should help them to get better Search Engine Ranking with minimal effort. They appear to be more of a shopping site rather than a deals site. So for all purpose, we can ignore them for further discussion.
Before moving on, do check out dealsearchmaadi from dealmaadi people. They search around 10 deals sites in India. This is definitely a smart thinking from the founder. Hats off!
Having gone through these sites, here are some of my thoughts.
- Google Adsense all the way – Appears to me like major source of income is from adsense and banner ads. Not very convincing for affiliates. Can Nidhi and others correct me, if I am wrong?
- What about our startups? – Excepting few like dealmaadi, not many provide deals in our e-tailer startups like flipkart. Why is that? Please crawl our desi startups (Indian startups) as well.
- Widgets and RSS – Widgets to embed in our blog and get points for referral. Later can reimburse those points. RSS for any search result. How about adding these two?
- Make good use of the data – Did you know that some of the data you collect might be very crucial for major e-tailers. Data like what category people search for in a month, what brand they visit often apart from competitors data are highly used in deciding the exact pricing + bundling for a product. Just make it easy for enterprises to access this data. Simple.
Have I missed something here? Suggest me via the comments.
Very indepth and neatly written post. Made me wonder why the heck I was still using ebay and indiaplaza instead of storrz or searching for a deal.desistartups is definitely giving more exposure to startups.Keep writing good posts. And congrats for getting the sponsors with a free blog
Rajiv
April 15, 2008
nice piece of information… i would like to read more o of information from time to time like this…
bhala
April 15, 2008
Prabhu,
Great insight about the deal/affiliate market in India and the diagram gives a good overview about the shopping/deals scenerio in India.
I personally believe that concept of ‘deals’ still does not exist in India. Most of the offers never expires as compared to US where there is a rush to buy stuff because the deal may expire any time.
allindiadeals.com – Good UI but they have number of deals which has a price mismatch. Search needs lot of improvement. If they are not getting any affiliate income then why the hack they are running the site.
dealmaadi – Kind of a community driven site can be built in 10 mins using Pligg (check Shweta Gupta’s blog)
However, there is no harm is using a ready to use free softwares but one should not just use for a shake of it. Top 4 deals on their homepage are posted 84, 261, 46, 214 days ago respectively..
Only 10 new deals and zero comments where posted on the site in last 20 days (check ‘New deals’ section) and most of them appears to be submitted by other site owners looking for free traffic. By NO means I can call it as community driven.
http://www.dealsearchmaadi.com is built on Google custom search. Its take 5-10mins in do create this site as well.
I completely agree with you on Onlinedeals and Singdeals…
Sorry, please take it as a constructive feedback, I am not trying to discourage anyone.
-Vijay
Vijay M
April 15, 2008
Wonderful piece of article giving various strategic pointers. Is all the above online space deals are trustworthy? How this trustworthiness is evaluated any enlightment on this would give precise information for the buyers about the online space deals as specified in this article.
Sreeram
April 15, 2008
Hi Vijay,
Nice find. I resisted from mentioning these points because.
1. e-tailing in India itself is not very great when compared to US/UK market.
2. allindiadeals has price mismatch. But they are not somebody like pricegrabber who can accept xml feeds from merchants to display accurate price right. They scrap the websites, parse all those nasty html to find out a number called Price. I am very sure this is the best one could do with scraping.
3. dealmaadi is pligg and dealsearchmaadi is Google custom search. And dealmaadi has lesser new deals. Agreed. But I dont want to blame the site owner for that. It is well known that deals and community driven deals is a very niche area in India. But that shouldn’t stop startups from targetting that segment and bloggers to blog about that segment right
I guess may be in one or two years, even desi online deals will have expiry dates!
Prabhu
April 15, 2008
@ Vijay,
does it matter how much time does a website take to develop. I think content in these website is more important. if you check deals pages like deals2buy or slickdeals.net or fatwallet, it either takes 10 minutes to develop or its open source.
Premnath Sah T.H.
Premnath Sah T.H.
April 15, 2008
@Prem
Nice to meet you Prem. Your blog is already in my reader.
Prabhu
April 15, 2008
Vijay – First of all thanks for visiting our website and providing your feedback.
We really try hard to maintain the accurate price of the product but since its a manually process their might be price mismatch at time. Once the merchants starts exposing product feeds this problem will not be their. We check and update the prices for most of our deals twice a week. So it might be just an intermittent time when you have noticed a price mismatch. I request our user to report any such price-mismatch though our contact us form.
Prabhu – Its the re-tailer thats does NOT have infrastructure like webservice or RSS to expose product/ price feeds. If the feeds are available we will be happy to consume them.
Regards,
Nidhi Modi
http://allindiadeals.com
Nidhi Modi
April 16, 2008
@nidhi
Thanks Nidhi. I guess both e-tailer and deals startups like you, doesn’t have api or atleast public apis. Correct me, if I am wrong.
Prabhu
April 16, 2008
When it comes to offers and deals category, it is yet to take-off fully in India, when compared to U.S. and U.K. where they have 1000s of sites dedicated exclusively for deals (both offline and online) and discount coupons. But thanx to these startups discussed above, it is slowly but steadily starting to grow in India too, thanx to globalization and broadband penetration in big cities at least.
Shiva
April 16, 2008
Good post. But I do not know how you can compare Singdeals with other deal aggregators. Singdeals is a comparison shopping search engine (who also happens to provide online deals) and the deal aggregators are web 2.0 sites.
Sesh
May 4, 2008
check http://www.dealsghost.com also
Deals Ghost
October 31, 2008
Another website is Jantareview – provides local deals and offers information
http://www.jantareview.com/promotions.php?city=Delhi&pg=Find%20Deals%20and%20Offers
J R
March 21, 2009