With every other business coming online and offering lucrative deals, customers are skeptical of buying products from one site. There is always a need of Amazon’s “Aur Dikhao” slogan with the best price offered along with preeminent deals. Online websites like smartprix, 91mobiles, mysmartprice, Pricedekhho, compareraja, junglee are a few portals that do not sell products but offer a price comparison platform.
Serving in the same domain is BuyHatke.com, that raised its first round of funding of $1 Mn (INR 6.4 Cr) from Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and Japanese ecommerce and Investment Company, BEENOS.
Co-founder and CEO, Gaurav Dahake, BuyHatke.com, confirmed that they plan to utilize the funds in marketing and working on new products, besides expanding the team size.
The idea for BuyHatke generated at the time when, Co-founders Gaurav Dahake and Prashant Singh were planning to buy an iPod as a gift for their friend. They browsed different sites and ordered one, discovering that the product will reach them late and moreover there was a deal less known but available on different site. Thus, the need to provide hassle-free online shopping experience gave rise to BuyHatke.
Founded in 2012, by IIT Kharagpur graduates, Gaurav Dahake, Prashant Singh and Srikanth Sethumadhavan, Buyhatke started with their registered office at Kolkata, later operating from Bangalore. The startup started with a mere investment of INR 2.5 lakh which now has a turnover of 3 Mn. The startup has Gross merchandise Volume (GMV) sales of $20 Mn. It earns revenue from affiliate sites, advertisements and exclusive home page listing for retailers.
The platform offers exhaustive product range of more than 1000 brands from around 47 credible portals. The startup right now serves over 10 Mn product searches via its different platforms of extension, web and mobile. It has the widest catalogue among all product and price discovery players with over 30 Mn products from over 300 websites in India.
The discovery platform offers a unique display model which helps the user discover relevant products. Besides, it offers a price trend to the consumer that shows the best time to buy a product.
The Bangalore-based startup gained popularity for developing a Chrome web browser extension, an online plug-in mechanism, to help buy Xiaomi phones at a quicker pace in flash sales when the Chinese handset maker launched devices in India last year. Presently, they also have a strong mobile presence with apps across Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
“We would be working on creating the best shopping research experience for the users and would love to touch every aspect of decision making that happens while making a shopping purchase decision. We plan to impact 10 Mn users monthly to have the ultimate shopping experience by this year’s end,” said Srikanth Sethumadhavan, Chief Design Lead, BuyHatke.
Earlier, the Japanese Investment Company, BEENOS had made investments in Indian startups including ShopClues, Citrus Payment Solutions and BigFoot Retail Solutions. Whereas, Kris Gopalakrishnan, has invested in other startups like Uniphore, Freshworld and JetSynthesys.
