eCommerce in India - A blog by Darpan Munjal

Recently I got an invitation from an old colleague to join Plaxo. I thought to myself – I don’t need another social network to maintain professional contacts, I already have LinkedIn! Within the next 3 days, I suddenly started receiving Plaxo invitations from my other LinkedIn contacts – it almost felt like some sort of evil spam! As much as I hate to sign up for a new site I don’t intend to use, my curiousity got the best of me, and I indulged in accepting the invitation to see what all the hype was about. Moments after clicking through the registration process, I realized how easy Plaxo made to import contacts from my other sources – Gmail, Outlook and most surprisingly from LinkedIn!!

These are the initial signs of what is changing in the digital world. Information created by users is following them from one site to another. This is particularly timely now that the users have started feeling the “network fatigue” that comes from maintaining multiple social-networking profiles, e-mail accounts, blogs, address book applications and the like. Things are changing, really changing in the social web. Initiatives such as Dataportability group are all about making the web more free flowing in terms of user data – most of the key players such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo have already signed up. If things pan out the way they are Continue reading »

The online shopping space in India is getting more and more crowded . Even though, the overall pie remains small, today’s customers have more options than ever when it comes to online shopping. This certainly is good news for aggregation platforms such as price comparison engines. The more options shoppers have, the greater value they would see in platforms that offer a one stop comparison of products and prices across retailers. Not surprisingly, several comparison shopping platforms have been launched in the Indian market. Tolmol.com and Bechna.com are the two most prominent ones. So if we have these comparison shopping platforms available, why aren’t people using them? Or are they?

Today’s Environment
Before we try to answer these questions, let’s try to explore the value proposition offered by these comparison shopping platforms. At the most basic level, a comparison shopping engine must deliver on a promise of accuracy, and unbiased price comparisons across a wide breadth of online retailers. The overall value proposition offered by these platforms is to help customers save time in making more informed shopping decisions. The question is how well are these comparison shopping platforms able to deliver on these basic promises? To explore this further, let’s take an example. Suppose, you are looking to buy a Nokia N70 phone – instead of visiting individual shopping sites separately, you decide to start with a comparison shopping platform like Tolmol.com. Performing a search for N70 on Tolmol.com quickly displays about 9 different online retailers selling this product. So far so good, however there is one little problem. Continue reading »