Scandid : An Application Bridging The Gap Between Users & Retailers

Even when you go for shopping by yourself, you’re not really alone. Countless friends, followers and resources are there in your pocket to influence your buying decisions. However, with so many alternative shopping options, you are never sure if you are buying a product at the best available deal. On the other hand, retailers are realizing that they need to catch up with changing consumer demand and rising growth of mobile and tablet commerce.

For bridging this gap between tech savvy users and retailers, “Scandid”, a barcode scanner application, find its place in this niche.

Launched in late 2013 by Madhur Khandelwal and Sushil Choudhari, Scandid, help users to get the best deals by simply scanning the product box or searching the product name. The app available on Android and iPhone compares the prices and coupons from all online stores.

Earlier the duo launched ShoppingWish, a price comparison portal. But analyzing the shopping habits and behavior of consumers in India, the portal pivoted to “Mobile First” approach with Scandid.

What?

The mobile app provides unique and simple features that help users to save time and money. The local shopping feature of app let users to select local stores in Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Pune, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Jaipur. Users have an option of selecting from 200 online as well as over 10,000 offline shopping options listed within the application.

Scandid is set to bring the new trend of research offline and purchase online to India against today’s popular trend of research online and purchase offline. The application has been majorly used by people to find the lowest prices and then buy it either online or from within the application. Also users can use it for “Showrooming” i.e. for searching offline and then buying online.

How?

Currently, almost 10,000 users have downloaded this application. Out of which, almost one third are weekly active. User group of Scandid consists of people of age group 18-25 years based out of 6 major metro cities.

The app aggregates users’ data from three sources to gain further insights about their buying habits. The primary data source is scraping the web to find online and offline stores, pricing and coupons. Secondary data is collected by partnering with retailers and integrating product feeds sent by them. Other data is crowd-sourced from the app submitted by the users while using it.

As per the data collected from various sources shows that most popular category on the application is books. This has been closely followed by gadgets and mobiles.

Revenue

The company has already started seeing early profits as it gets affiliate commission when a user buys something using Scandid web platform or mobile application. The founders are also working with local retailers by charging them on a cost-per-lead basis.

The company is in plans to invest in paid marketing in coming years for lead generation and getting more business. However it will continue to participate in various events for brand building purposes.

The Pune based app has raised angel funding from Sandeep Johri and other angel investors based out of Silicon Valley and New York in 2013. Also the application has been featured at top tech events such as Techcrunch Bangalore, MobileSparks, NASSCOM Product Conclave, Google App Expo and have received an encouraging response.

Team

In their earlier roles, Madhur was a founding engineer at Thefind.com (one of the largest shopping search engines in the US) while Sushil was a co-founder at Dhingana (a leading Bollywood music app in India). Both of them have worked earlier at Microsoft together.

[Co-Written by Jayati]