Lowprice – Best comparison shopping experience on your mobile phone

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15 Comments

1. 

   Rishi May 26, 2015, 4:00 am

   Pranay: How do you collect/refresh data for each store/category/product/spec?

2. 

   Pranay Airan May 26, 2015, 4:39 am

   Hi Rishi,

   we are using Buyt.in as our data provider. They refresh this data everyday per product. 

3. 

   Rishi May 26, 2015, 5:19 am

   So is this app owned by buyt.in? If not, what’s stopping them from doing the same thing or pulling the plug on data access to your service? 

   re. your question: Personally, I’m little hesitant about the idea of downloading an app to compare price because this is not something I’d use daily or weekly. I’m still okay with a mobile friendly website. Would be interesting to see what others think. With so many price comparison apps/services the challenge becomes how do you establish this as THE most reliable and how do you spread the word so that people are aware and are willing to download it. I think there is a bigger play in B2B for this.

4. 

   Pranay Airan May 26, 2015, 5:48 am

   It is not, nothing is stopping them to do the same thing on there own. It is standard for any api provider nothing is stopping them to build on there own. But one thing you need to understand is it is not about apps or site it is all about traffic. If Buyt can get more traffic from 10 apps they will give api to 10 apps.

   I totally agree lot of people might be happy with the mobile friendly website. It is a choice of app experience vs mobile site experience.

   Can you elaborate on B2B thing ?

5. 

   Rishi May 26, 2015, 6:50 am

   So either way you don’t have much of an advantage, right?

   Anyways, on the B2B front imagine what all sellers can do with aggregate pricing data, trends etc. and adjust their marketplace pricing accordingly. There’s so much one can do on the analytics front.

6. 

   Pranay Airan May 26, 2015, 7:04 am

   I do i can replace the datasource any time with any other provider dont have to change lot of code.

7. 

   Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal May 31, 2015, 12:34 pm

   Nice! Just installed

   How can I help specifically?

8. 

   Pranay Airan May 31, 2015, 1:27 pm

   Thanks Alok,

   Will love to get your feedback on following 

   • Do you think price comparison on mobile will work ??
   • Are you happy with current experience or think it needs to change or be different then usual comparison shopping flow ?
   • What is good in current app and what can be improved  ?
   • Is there any thing missing ?? Have you used any other price comparison app and feel they are doing something better which we need to do ?
   • Some tips on marketing the app better ?

   Sorry for the long list 🙂

9. 

   asha chaudhry May 31, 2015, 1:29 pm

   pranay, 

   just edit your post and add this feedback wishlist on it 🙂

10. 

    Pranay Airan May 31, 2015, 1:31 pm

    Thanks Done 🙂

11. 

    Rishi May 31, 2015, 1:37 pm

    Pranay, see this? I’m actually shocked it took FK so long to launch this. Image what you can do once you step outside scope of FK and have access to all seller pricing data/trends etc. Exactly what I meant.

    

12. 

    Pranay Airan May 31, 2015, 1:41 pm

    Thanks,

    I understand, there are dedicated platforms like priceweave who is doing this. Flipkart can do this because they have sales data, for us the challenge is conversion it is for now not possible to know if sale is done for which product. But thanks, will check

13. 

    Rishi May 31, 2015, 1:59 pm

    Sales is just one piece of it, you don’t even have to look at sales if that’s your concern. I wasn’t try to convince you to do something else, just throwing some ideas to help differentiate.

    Having said that, you should really do what you feel like doing… B2C/B2B etc. doesn’t matter as long you feel strongly about it 🙂 Best wishes.

14. 

    Raghvendra Saboo June 1, 2015, 6:38 pm

    I usually do price comparison on desktop. There is no reason to do it on small screen if bigger screen is within reach.

    But I would use a mobile app, if it does the following things, that can be done only on a mobile

    1. If I fav an item, I should get notifications on price drop
    2. If there is a massive price drop for an item that I browsed but didn’t fav, I should get a notification.
    3. If any of my phone addressbook friend or Facebook friend has browsed or fav-d the same item, the app should tell me that.
    4. If it can show me notification of an item at offline shop in 5 KM vicinity

    Without these features, I would still use a price comparison app, when I am at a retail store. It would be awesome if I could scan the barcode of a product & avoid few keystrokes.

    If I use this app at an offline store, I would be OK if you sell my browsing data to the store i.e a customer looked at X product while she was in the store & the app indicates that he walked out in 3 mins after the app went in background.

    ******************************************************************************************************************************************

    Now about the B2B thing that Rishi touched upon:

    If I am a seller at one or more ecomm marketplaces, I manually monitor the price set by my competing sellers. Monitoring the prices is critical since on ecomm I lose customers if my competitor’s price is lesser by even Rs 5. My pain is doing this manually, time spent & business lost when I don’t have real-time visibility.

    As a seller, I would pay for an app, that lets me bookmark the products I sell & alerts me :

    1. When a competitor reduces the price, so that I can match it.
    2. When a competitor goes out-of-stock, so that I can increase the price.
    3. When a competitor adds a new product in it’s portfolio.

    *******************************************************************************************************************************************

    If I am an ecomm marketplace, I would love to to see category to SKU level analytics on product assortment & prices.

    I would want you to provide me data on categories where the “Buy” button clicked on your app was mostly on competitor’s site.

    I might augment the “user interest graph” deciphered by my app & website with your data, coz when customer was into your app, it was an opportunity lost for my app – not just on sales but also on knowing you better for my personalization push.

    *******************************************************************************************************************************************

    If I am a brand, say like Titan, today a lot of my resources go into manually checking 

    1. Is there price under-cutting underway, destroying my brand & offline dealers
    2. Are there “unauthorized” sellers in the system
    3. In which PIN Codes online is strong / weak
    4. How are product reviews across marketplaces? What’s the “sentiment”?
    5. Mystery shopping from new sellers popping up (with random shipping addresses), to determine fakes / used products being sold.

    ********************************************************************************************************************************************

    All in all, I guess a lot could be done with publicly available (scraped) data from marketplaces for different classes of consumers.

    A leader B2C price comparison app can do stuff beyond affiliate revenues through best price surfacing. 

    I have tried the app. It’s good. I believe it’s primary customers are mobile-only users. These longish comments come from a desktop user, so take them with truckloads of salt 😉

     

     

15. 

    Pranay Airan June 2, 2015, 5:35 am

    That is some awesome piece of advice and review i got. Thanks 🙂 some of the features which you said will be coming soon 🙂

    Well for B2B that is an awesome idea but unfortunately not my forte, also Priceweave (a dataweave) product is doing most of that stuff though they don’t have an app yet 😉

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