Online shopping scene hotting up in India
More merchants & retailers going online:
FutureBazaar joined the ranks of Fabmall (now called indiaplaza)- retail chains that also offer an online shopping experience.
I have always maintained that for success in Indian markets the online offering needs to be supported with a good offline presence.
Shaadi & naukri are good examples of the above statement & I do not know of too many profitable websites operating in the Indian space.
(May be I am wrong, please point out if you know of ones that are doing very well)
I feel these guys will have an edge over the standard online shopping websites. The power of their network & what a good combination of online & offline presence can achieve in a country like India, should boost them significantly.
There are existing online shopping sites from Rediff, sify & ebay, but none having an offline presence (do they ? )
Potential advantages of having a strong offline network include:
- Simplify inventory management & delivery of goods: these become much less expensive
- generate sales leads from 1 medium to the other -
With the presence of good online merchants another space that has become a possibility is - comparison shopping.
1 place to look at offerings from all (multiple) online merchants
I am aware of 3 decent comparison shopping sites.(are there any more ?)
Bechna
Ultop
CompareIndia
Would like to do a detailed analysis & review, for each one of them.
For now, all of them seem to support a good set of categories.
Though they are still in the "listings" mode where they just list offers from different sources & do not try & match products & show multiple offers for 1 product in the same place. Given that doing this in the electronics space is non-trivial I dont expect this feature to come anytime soon.
Very interesting space.
I am surprised there arent any efforts with mobile as the medium, given the proliferation of cell phones in India, along with the fact that people do spend money using their cell phones ( everyone is advertising ring tones, hello tines, wallpapers & other nonsense).
Given that these "not-so-great products are doing very well on the mobile, any half-decent-but-useful commerce application on the mobile should hit it big.
Some of the finds are thanks to Iqbal Gandham's blog
FutureBazaar joined the ranks of Fabmall (now called indiaplaza)- retail chains that also offer an online shopping experience.
I have always maintained that for success in Indian markets the online offering needs to be supported with a good offline presence.
Shaadi & naukri are good examples of the above statement & I do not know of too many profitable websites operating in the Indian space.
(May be I am wrong, please point out if you know of ones that are doing very well)
I feel these guys will have an edge over the standard online shopping websites. The power of their network & what a good combination of online & offline presence can achieve in a country like India, should boost them significantly.
There are existing online shopping sites from Rediff, sify & ebay, but none having an offline presence (do they ? )
Potential advantages of having a strong offline network include:
- Simplify inventory management & delivery of goods: these become much less expensive
- generate sales leads from 1 medium to the other -
- send marketing promos online (emails)
- coupons - interesting space & a site that just does coupons/offers/discounts for offline shoppers is OfferForShoppers
With the presence of good online merchants another space that has become a possibility is - comparison shopping.
1 place to look at offerings from all (multiple) online merchants
I am aware of 3 decent comparison shopping sites.(are there any more ?)
Bechna
Ultop
CompareIndia
Would like to do a detailed analysis & review, for each one of them.
For now, all of them seem to support a good set of categories.
Though they are still in the "listings" mode where they just list offers from different sources & do not try & match products & show multiple offers for 1 product in the same place. Given that doing this in the electronics space is non-trivial I dont expect this feature to come anytime soon.
Very interesting space.
I am surprised there arent any efforts with mobile as the medium, given the proliferation of cell phones in India, along with the fact that people do spend money using their cell phones ( everyone is advertising ring tones, hello tines, wallpapers & other nonsense).
Given that these "not-so-great products are doing very well on the mobile, any half-decent-but-useful commerce application on the mobile should hit it big.
Some of the finds are thanks to Iqbal Gandham's blog