Take three graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), throw in an unpleasant shopping experience, back it up with the monthly stipends received from the college, and you get a new price comparison startup.
The idea took shape when Gaurav Dahake and Prashant Singh were browsing ecommerce sites to find an iPod to give as a gift for a friend’s birthday. They were looking for the best deals available and after three hours they decided on a deal. But things didn’t go as planned. The friend received the gift a day after his birthday. Dahake and Singh also realized that they could have found a better deal on another website.
They roped in a third member, Srikanth Sethumadhavan, bootstrapped, and started BuyHatke, an online product and price discovery service, in 2012 with a capital of INR 200,000 (USD$3150).
The young entrepreneurs learned about the business world the hard way. Starting out as college students, they faced challenges in various forms like learning about legal issues, figuring out the ideal business model for their site, and understanding how to file a trademark. Initially, a few investors approached the team but they opted to bootstrap.
Today, the site receives around 100,000 visits on a daily basis with revenues flowing through affiliate sites, advertisements, and exclusive homepage listing for retailers.
BuyHatke scans around 50 websites to find the best deals for 25 million products through a system which provides search results for price comparison and related coupons. It also lets users view price graphs and set price alerts. Users can find prices and specs on mobile phones and browse 4.7 million book titles on the website. They can also install price comparison browser extensions on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to understand the trends through graphs and look for recommendations in similar categories.
BuyHatke users can also download mobile apps on Android, iOS, and Windows phones. “The users can download a single app instead of downloading multiple shopping apps. They can browse and make a purchase without leaving the app,” says Dahake.
It is a competitive space to be in with comparison portals like PriceBag, MySmartPrice, PriceCheckIndia, PriceBaba, and Find Yogi in the market. However, these portals are limited in their coverage, usually restricting themselves to mobile phone or electronic comparisons only.
Options galore, but it still needs more
The site’s algorithm monitors the price of the products through an automated checking system. The firm claims to have an accuracy rate of 97 percent on price comparisons for popular products. “There might be errors on obscure products,” says Dahake, as the product may not always be available on the websites on a regular basis.
Admittedly, the experience with lesser-known products is far from ideal on BuyHatke’s website and app. Honestly speaking, the relevance ranking of the results is not up to scratch. Users will have to be specific with their queries to zero in on the items they are actually looking for. A common query like ‘Playstation 3 Games’ yields around 40 results, which is low, given the number of games available.
To build an intuitive algorithm and normalize obscure queries does require resources and expertise, but as a user, I’ll find myself going back to browsing the popular shopping portals if the choices are limited to only a few results. Perhaps a tweak on the query optimization and some more work on the relevance ranking for results will make users opt to visit the site more often.
BuyHatke aims to cover over 100 websites by the end of the Q1 2015. More importantly, the team remembers how it all started for them. To add the new websites, they run a reliability check, which means placing an order and keeping an eye on the delivery date.
See: Big backlash for Flipkart on its Big Billion Day
This post How 3 graduates bootstrapped a price comparison website from the ground up in India appeared first on Tech in Asia.
How 3 graduates bootstrapped a price comparison website from the ground up in India
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