Online shopping is growing at exponential rate in India. National and International retailers including Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and now Alibaba, all are participating in this growth. With more and better options available to customers comes much more dilemma to choose one. Huge discounts, combos, deals, and offers are offered to customers on a regular basis and customers now expect to be wooed with better and better deals each day by E-commerce giants. When customers are caught in this swirl of price and quality, ‘comparison among all the options’ paves its way through.
This need of hour has been received by industry positively and services like ‘online Price Comparison’ have been introduced. These are being implemented by utilization of ‘Compare Shopping Engines.’
With tremendous growing popularity rate of online shopping in India, the associated services like online price comparison are also gaining popularity. This is why Shopping Comparison Engines have become so popular lately in India.
What are Compare Shopping Engines?
As per the CompareRaja, Comparison shopping engines collect various product related information like pricing, features, sellers and present this information on a single page depending on the user’s query. This helps shoppers to compare prices of various online sellers at one place enabling them to pick the best price. This not only helps shoppers to save money but also time. These are also referred as comparison shopping website, price comparison website, comparison shopping agent, or shopbot.
The number of Shopbots have gone multi-fold recently. Currently, Junglee, MySmartPrice, CompareIndia, PriceDekho, CompareRaja are few major players of online price comparison segment.
Compareraja.in is India’s leading price comparison website. Team CompareRaja did a survey on Role of Price Comparison in Online & Offline Shopping. The survey was conducted primarily on the popular social networking site Facebook. More than 1000 shoppers participated in the survey and below are the results of the same.
- More than 97% of the shoppers compare prices before buying.
- About75%of the shoppers who took survey said that after comparing the prices online they bargain at the local stores.
- Nearly 59% compare the prices of the products both at online and offline stores before making their final purchase decision.
- About 73%of the shoppers use online price comparison sites/app or shopping comparison engines (CSEs) to compare prices before shopping. Whereas about 27%shoppers make us of mediums other than price comparison sites/apps.
- Another interesting fact that came to the fore is that 73.6%of the people who use price comparison services said they compare prices on the price comparison websites instead of apps. Only 26.4%of the shoppers said they use mobile apps for comparing prices. The lower percentage of app usage can be attributed to the fact that these apps are not very user-friendly.
A huge potential lies in online price comparison segment, waiting to be harnessed. While it might be gaining momentum in the country, but as the survey suggest, improving ‘means to reach customers’ such as making mobile apps more user-friendly can definitely cement a shopbot’s position at top in the race! Also, due to competition to win over the race by all shopbots, customers can expect a significant improvement in services offered in approaching days!
