Price & Product Comparison Website

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Online Start-Up Idea: Price & Product Comparison Website

Indian e-commerce market is expected to reach USD 24 billion by 2015. Internet penetration & hence the number of internet users is increasing rapidly. According to ComScore (which is one of the leading research organizations), in Nov 2011, 27.2 million online users in India visited online shopping websites. This is 18% growth compared to previous year. 

Around 60% of the internet users have visited online shopping websites in Nov 2011. 7.6 million Users visited coupon websites which is a 629% increase compared to previous year. Consumer Electronics was then next with 7.1 million visitors growing 12 percent from the previous year. Read the detailed information about growing Indian e-commerce market & business opportunities in article ‘Growing e-Commerce Business in India’

There are several e-commerce websites launched in India. The total number will surely reach up to 100 or even more. Many e-commerce websites will keep on launching in future. E-commerce has made shopping easy but still there is a scope of improvement. While shopping on e-commerce websites users face following issues,

  1. Buyers need to visit several e-commerce websites and compare product prices and other features/benefits to find out the best deal for the product they are looking for. Product prices differ according to various e-commerce websites.

  2. There are several couponing websites available which provide discounts through discount coupons/vouchers. But, buyers need to visit various couponing websites to find most suitable discount coupon for the product he/she is looking for.

  3. There are few e-commerce websites which offer cashback on online shopping. But this does not guarantee the best deal. 

More the websites more are the deals & hence the online shopping becomes time consuming and cumbersome. The idea is to have a product & price comparison website which will compare all the features & prices of a particular product for consumer, it will offer discounts through coupons/vouchers & it will provide cashback. The goal is to provide the best & cheapest deal to the customer in one click. 


Let’s have a look at how these websites function,

Price comparison websites:

Price comparison websites help consumers to identify the best deal. This is achieved by using web crawlers or web spiders (computer programs/Tools) which crawl various e-commerce websites and gather important data which is shown to the customer as per requirement. 

Coupon websites:

Coupon websites offer discounts through coupons/vouchers to the customers. High level functioning of coupon websites is something like this,

  1. User visits coupon website and buys a coupon by online payment

  2. User gets hold of coupon instantly

  3. User needs to carry the printed coupon or SMS with coupon code or email with coupon to get the deal

  4. In case of online shopping, user is prompted for the coupon code. When user enters the code, he/she gets a discount on the purchase. 

Cashback websites:

Cashback websites have tie ups with the manufacturers. When any product is sold, commission is charged by the website to the manufacturers. A percentage in this commission is shared with the buyer by the e-commerce website. When cashback reaches to a certain amount, website transfers that amount to the user’s account.

 

This idea of this product and price comparison website can be implemented in three steps,

Step 1: Product & Price comparison

There are two types of comparisons that can be provided,

  1. Comparing two different products – In this kind of comparison two different products of the same or different companies can be compared. E.g. comparison between Samsung Galaxy S3 & Nokia Lumia 900. Resultant comparison table will have comparison on the basis various features as shown in the image below,

Image description

2. Comparing a product price from various e-commerce websites – In this kind of comparison prices of the      same product are compared on various e-commerce websites. User can select a specific category like           ‘Mobiles & Accessories’, and enter a mobile name in search box. When user clicks on ‘Search’ button, a web spider implemented in this comparison website will crawl other e-commerce websites and find out      information about the product searched by the user. Basic price comparison can be in a format shown in the table below. E-commerce websites often offer discounts in various forms. Column ‘offers’ specifies the offer provided by respective website. This offer can be in the form of cash back, discount coupon and discount by manufacturer.

Image description

Step 2: Discount Coupons

Web crawler implemented in this website will crawl couponing websites & will find out most suitable coupon depending upon the e-commerce website or manufacturer who offered it. This amount will appear in the ‘Discount Coupons’ column as shown in the image below. It will also have a hyperlink which will be the landing page for that particular coupon either on couponing website or on manufacturer’s website.

Image description

Step 3: Cashback

Around 50-60% of the e-commerce websites offer commission whenever user follows link on any website to any particular e-commerce website and make purchase. So if a user visits this comparison website, compares a product, clicks on ‘Go to Store’ button to navigate to e-commerce website & buys any product then that particular e-commerce will offer certain pre-decided commission. A part of this commission can be shared with buyer as ‘cash back’. This amount can be transferred to the user’s profile account registered with this website. Once the amount reaches to a certain pre-defined limit, user should be able to transfer it to his/her bank account. Other way is to include search results from other cashback websites which will help buyers to get cashback from respective websites. 

Image description

The total price would be,

Price (Rs) – Offers (Rs) – Discount coupons (Rs) – Cash back (Rs) = Total (Rs)

 

This idea can be implemented in any country provided there are sufficient e-commerce websites available to compare the products.

 

Technology:

This website will function by crawling other websites. The program implemented or the tools used are known as web crawlers or web spiders. Web crawler is a computer program which scans pre-decided websites by passing keywords (e.g. Product name) and gathers data which can be saved in database or xml format. This data can be organized in preferred format and can be shown to the customer in the format shown above. To get more information about web crawlers/spiders, please have a look at these links,

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/search-engine1.htm

http://www.slideshare.net/sanchitsaini/working-of-a-web-crawler

Revenue:

  1. Affiliate commission – as mentioned above, e-commerce websites offer commission whenever user follows link on any website to any particular e-commerce website and make purchase. Becoming an affiliate of an e-commerce websites is one of the major source of revenue.

  2. Advertisements – website can use advertising programs like Google ads or its own advertisements wherein individual advertisers will display their ads on this website. 


Let us know your views on this idea. You can write to us at internetstartupideas@gmail.com