Aren’t all of us are confused shoppers? Most of us speak regularly “are yaar I want to buy a mobile phone but little confused kaun sa le? In fact right from a housewife choosing potato to buying a home confusion is predominant. In fact this phenomenon is called gruen effect.
It’s a big problem let me tell you why? First finding the right product is time consuming and an old adage goes “time is money”. Second there are high chances that we might end up buying a product that doesn’t satisfy us or give us the level of delight. Third the price we spent might not be worthy. Finally it is mentally challenging!
This problem led to the growth of comparison shopping and price comparison sites are hot and they say they provide recommendation. Hold on, we are far from a solution! The reason is all recommendations are based on specification comparison. Today if you want to purchase a mobile phone with a budget of 20k you will be flooded with options. Let’s say your priority is battery, camera and good design. Ironically you will find at least 60-70 mobiles with same megapixels, same battery mAh. Now what you do? You ask friends, read reviews. Why? Because comparing specification failed and in reality you are using the power of word of mouth expressed in the form of online reviews to shape up your mind.
This entire process of consumer decision making is time consuming. So we decided to solve it. While solving we found it’s a mathematical problem with many variables interlinked to each other. Battery performance depends on processor. Megapixels are not the only determining factor for camera quality. Just look at Iphone 6, one of the best camera phone has only 8 MP camera. Opps! More on that next time with data!
How we solved it? (www.bazaarfunda.com) We extract thousands of reviews, conversations etc. and then do parametric text analytics to find what people are talking about the camera quality, battery quality etc. of each phone. We rate the phone on these parameters based on the reviews and also accumulate the pros and cons. This way we eliminate the hassle of reading reviews, making decisions, comparing prices all at one go.
It’s our endeavour to provide the best shopping experience. Before ending let me tell you what users of our website asked? Why are you not including other products? Let me answer it. We would with time. Our text analytics tool is built in-house and we develop a different tool for each category. We chose not to use open source tools because the accuracy of text analysis dropped down to 15-20 %. So we developed our own tools to achieve accuracy of 90 % otherwise the problem would still remain unsolved. So we promise to include the entire gamut of consumer goods with time and yeah keep checking us out for new upcoming features.
By the way while browsing Cricinfo I saw Samsung running compare now promotion for Galaxy S6 Edge and Iphone 6 on their own website. I will show the real comparison with data in my next article. Till then if you want to buy phone then compare phones, prices and choose your phone from www.bazaarfunda.com . Do share us your experience.
Krishna Chandra Dey
Co-Founder- StratDecider analytics
krishswat@gmail.com
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Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
I did not realise the entire site is dedicated to mobile phones!
Ps – whats the business model?