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1. 

   Sandeep Yelubolu December 27, 2013, 11:07 am

   The need is not clear, If you would like to compare Bigbasket with other online grocery, then you will have aggregate the data from both and cater to the specific smart purchase to the end user.

2. 

   Karthikeyan December 27, 2013, 11:21 am

   Hi Sandeep,

                    Bigbasket is just an example, what am looking at is, say if a person comes to the website, he should be able to compare 3-4 stores for the best price. And I want to know from where do we get the data from?

3. 

   Abhishek Rai December 27, 2013, 3:04 pm

   Hi !

   If the goal is to make a price comparison engine, then you will have to build a web scraper.

   Also, it is not legal on many sites and robots.txt of most of the sites might not allow, your spider to get the details.

   If it is a focused, grocery only, price comparison engine, then you might like to talk those 3-4 companies and ask them to share the data with you.

   Also, I presume, since none of them have an API, you will have to get the data in database export formats.

   They can set up a CRON job for you, with which you can get the data from them daily. The data you would receive from 3-4 companies would be all in separate format and you will have to sort them manually.

   The categories, sub-categories would differ and biggest issue would be the item names, which would be different for all of the companies.

   A lot of manual work would involve, but going forward it becomes easier, as the prices do not change daily.

   You can do a V-LOOKUP every day with the data, and update the prices, of the items which has changed.

   My Suggestion-: Price comparison is a thing of the past now. Prices are standard, with not much difference across companies, selling the same standard, branded products. So, it is not advisable to go for it.

   Specifically in Grocery, the changes are more so minuscule.

   regards

   abhishek

4. 

   Karthikeyan January 11, 2014, 10:13 am

   Hi Abhishek,

                      Sorry for the delayed response & thanks for your feedback. I do agree with that the task of updating the prices will be difficult. I have some odd 8000+ database of product names and their prices.

   I agree with “The categories, sub-categories would differ and biggest issue would be the item names, which would be different for all of the companies.” But I intend to build something like Airbnb.com where the search happens based on the keywords, so we can potentially knock out the categories, subcategories and only focus on the product names.

   I fail to understand why price comparison engine is a thing of the past. If a website provides only the price information, I would agree with your point. But if a website provides price comparison and an option to place order, I feel that’ll make sense to the customer. Even Redbus in a way does price comparison, still they’ve disrupted the market and have created a new business for themselves.

   Also I agree that prices are standard and the changes are very minuscule but why would players like Auchan, Big Bazaar, Reliance Fresh keep spending money so such on TOI, Hindu etc, every week.

   Cheers,

   Karthik

5. 

   Shravan January 11, 2014, 2:16 pm

   Hi Karthik,

   I am currently interning with a online grocery portal in Hyderabad which has been recently launched.

   If I can be of any help, please inbox me.

6. 

   Akshat Goel January 11, 2014, 4:50 pm

   Hi Karthikeyan,

   I have been in retail industry for a long 5-10 years. Not online but offline. Whereas advertisements by big brands in news paper is considered is mostly focused on few most important commodities i.e sugar, rice and pulses. Whereas rest all the products are sold at almost same price. Now think if you are going to create search engines for 50 products would it be feasible?

    Just look at offline stores around you? How do you compare them?
   With their all products? or With their prices of few commodities like sugar, atta, pulses and rice. This is where these big brands are profiting. Rest all product by big retail brands like PnG and hindustan lever have very less margin, so their prices are atmost same. Just 1-2Rs price difference.

   Regards,

   Akshat 

7. 

   Karthikeyan January 11, 2014, 5:40 pm

   Hi Akshat,

                  Thanks for the feedback… I agree that there a very less margins for branded products, but let’s look at it as a market place where any supermarket or a hypermarket can get listed and in turn they would get online orders. 

   Another point to make here is: Let’s say you want to buy unbranded products like sugar, atta, pulses etc, you get the products at the same price anywhere be it organized retail or unorganized retail. Then why would people go to the organized players?

   Cheers,

   Karthik

8. 

   Karthikeyan January 15, 2014, 8:10 pm

   Hi Shravan,

                   Thanks for reaching out. Will get in touch with you soon.

   Karthik

9. 

   Darshan Bhambiru January 16, 2014, 9:33 pm

   You should check this!!! What you are trying to get done or achieve is Under the purview of BIG Data!

   Currently being done for the USA, soon India would also be a part of the same as an addition not to be ignored!

   Indix, a big data startup based in Chennai, is building a catalog for all of the world’s over 1 billion consumer products to help brands compare prices and make crucial business decisions. Indix is positioning itself as a neutral aggregator of all the world’s e-commerce inventory, and hundreds of millions of products that can be otherwise searched on Google, but without any personalized insights.

   Founded by veteran Microsoft executive Sanjay Parthasarathy in 2012, Indix has already created a database of around 200 million products in the cloud. In two years, the startup plans to scale it to over 1 billion listings. Since going live with the platform in October last year, Indix has signed up some high profile customers including Microsoft, which is using the product to get real-time price and channel intelligence for its online store.

   Indix is only meant for brands and retailers, and has not been opened for consumers to buy products directly online.

   According to Parthasarathy, while Amazon is limited to the products it has in its own catalog and its marketplace while Google is limited by the way it employs its search algorithms.

   On top of its product database, Indix offers customized app and API for retailers to tap into the platform and gain real-time insights based on their preferences. The Indix app is no way meant to replace a customer’s existing enterprise applications that offer analytics, but it presents another version (which is much bigger and deeper in scale) of the marketplace.

   Address in India
   IIT Madras Research Park
   C2, 8th Floor, Kanagam Road, Taramani, Chennai – 600 113.
   Email : info@indix.com

   Hope this helps!! Cheers! 🙂

10. 

    Sujatha S April 12, 2015, 12:10 pm

    Hi Karthikeyan,

    I have been evaluating this grocery price comparison idea lately. Have you started off this business. What has been the outcome so far?

    Regards,
    Sujatha

11. 

    Amit Shroff April 15, 2015, 3:46 am

    Are you planning to create a comparison website for online grocery store? I suggest you approach the big players and check if they have any affiliate marketing API, if yes then use it. Since it would give you more relevant data and would be easier to manage and built.

    Additionally, you could also earn if any purchase happen through your website. 

     

12. 

    Sujatha S April 20, 2015, 5:58 pm

    Thanks for those 2 cents Amit. Yes,Affiliate APIs seems to be the way ahead . However online grocers don’t seem to have a well established Affiliate program like Flipkart  .. So, have to reach out to them individually 🙂  

13. 

    Amit Shroff April 23, 2015, 2:48 am

    Sujatha very difficult, you would need to have a team who can do a field job or approach them to sell online through your portal. Else not possible since they are 1000 of items and price changing every day.

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