Hyderabad based MySmartPrice is a shopping research platform whose price comparison service helps users find products at the best price across all top Indian ecommerce stores. With deals and coupons integrated into their main site, they help users make better purchase decisions.
“We were always excited about the Indian ecommerce scenario and knew we wanted a piece of the action’ says Sulakshan Kumar, Co-founder of the company. Before starting out, he and his team checked their core competencies and they were product management, technology and consumer related services. Hence, a comparison shopping site fit the bill perfectly.
How does it work?
MySmartPrice lists the prices of all products across top ecommerce sites and lists them out. These prices are periodically refreshed to improve the accuracy of the product. In case of extremely popular products, these prices are even refreshed every 15 minutes.
With embedded coupons, the website makes sure that all possible discounts are informed to the user so that the user may make wiser purchases.
Sulakshan and Sitakanta Ray(co-founder) had embarked on their journey with an idea to make a minimum viable product that could be improved upon. They started with books and soon moved to mobile phones, comparing prices of 5-6 stores. Once the mobiles category picked up, within 3 months they started attracting over 1 Million users a month.
“After this we didn’t look back. Expanding to new categories and adding more stores” says Sulakshan.
Currently they get 15 million monthly visitors and have about 9 million unique users. They work on an affiliate commissions model, where they are paid a small percentage as commission by ecommerce stores for sales that they reflect on their websites.
In developed markets, the affiliates contribute up to 20% of the total sales on e-retail stores. If one goes by the same assumption, in India the affiliates will have a potential of doing 20% ($4Bn) of expected $20Bn GMV of e-retail stores by 2018.
With a dream to be the dominant player in Indian affiliate industry, MySmartPrice was launched in October 2010. The company started out as a bootstrapped venture and was funded with the founders’ savings. When the site started gaining good traction, they gained revenue from commission for-sales. In late 2011, they got funded by Accel Partners and Helion Ventures.
Unlike its competitors, MySmartPrice as a product provides accurate and exhaustive pricing. It provides users with updated prices which makes sure that they know exactly what the prices in various stores are.
In addition with embedded coupons they make sure users are also are made aware of any potential discounts they might otherwise miss out on. With additional features such as:
Price graph: Informs users about the price changes of the phone.
Price Alert: Informs users when a product is available at their budget.
Expert Reviews and Product comparison, are some of the features that makes it stand out from the rest.
The company doesn’t believe in aggressive marketing expenses to increase traffic and instead relies on steady sustainable growth and customer advocacy for growth.
MySmartPrice intends to become the ultimate shopping research destination for Indian users. They are currently working on increasing the number of categories and are working on additional features to improve customer experience.
They also plan to list every single product that is sold in India, on MySmartPrice. “If it is sold online in India, it is available on MySmartPrice” says Sulakshan.
This is part of our special series, In Focus: The Hyderabad Startup Ecosystem, where we cover the tech and startup ecosystem of the next upcoming startup hub, Hyderabad.
