The growth of ecommerce in India has led to a number of ecommerce stores to pop-up. The simple online shopping policies have made customers incline towards the exploring the online world. They prefer to shop online with good deals rather than going to stores and bargain for the same products. With the drastic increase in the number of stores, the race to provide the best offers and discounts to users is becoming quite fierce now.
There is clearly a need for a platform where online shoppers can locate all the best deals, all in one place. This has led to the birth of a number of different coupon and deal aggregator websites like Coupons.com, Couponduniya, RetailMeNot, Cashkaro, CouponRani, etc.
There is yet another player, Zoutons.com, that opened to tap into this market earlier last year. It’s a coupons and deal aggregation website, helping online shoppers and deal hunters to locate latest coupons and offers from a vast pool of online retailers, banks & brands.
Zoutons offers coupons and deals of the top 50 Banks in India and more than 500 pan-India brands. It’s main aim is to enhance the role of coupons and promotional codes in incremental business portfolios of its merchant partners. They focus on providing for the space by creating the best B2C channel for the ecommerce industry.
How does it works?
Zoutons has tied up with ecommerce stores like Jabong, Myntra, Snapdeal, Yepme etc. to provide their coupons to deal hunters. The website helps in finding deals and discounts on various products ranging from home appliances to computer accessories, designer wear for men, women and kids, discount on holiday packages. It even offers discount and user verified deals on popular brands like Adidas, Reebok, Provogue, etc.
“Many of the people from our team are compulsive online shoppers and regularly hunt for best coupons, discounts etc. In a way, our passion for discount hunting and the thought of Zoutons as a product being a logical extension to our affiliate marketing company made us internally incubate the idea of Zoutons,” said Sahil Chalana, one of the co-founder’s.
The platform also offers number of Bank loyalty discounts offers. It provides users with deals of about 300 Indian brands like Nike, Adidas and the latest Credit Card/ Debit card & loyalty discounts by almost all banks in India i.e. one of the only places where you could discover Citibank, Amex offers.
A clean User Interface is provided to solve the major issue of preventing the premature exit of customers while shopping. Zoutons, by providing a clean UI and manually verifing deals up to some extent decreases this chance.
The data acquired since the inception of the website proves that the deal sites do indeed drive quantitatively and qualitatively strongly motivated consumers. The website tries to impose the increased customer loyalty and brand reputation upon partnering merchants by quality testing of deals and exclusive implementation of SEM, which also significantly decreases the bounce rate.The structure of the website allows more probability of the users to try a new brand or switch to a new brand, which is the reason behind the partnership with more than 500 stores.
The platform is witnessing 30-40K unique visitors every month and is earning revenues of about 2-3 Lakh per month.
The existence of number of coupon websites in India shows a high potential for such platforms in the country. In similar space, recently Times Internet had acquired coupon service CouponDunia, online Coupon Marketplace Shop Pirate had raised Rs 50 Lakh In Funding. Last year, Flipit had also launched its service in India. Another player, Cashkaro, a cashback and coupon site, had also raised USD 750,000 in seed funding from UK based group of angel investors, last year.
Zoutons launched last year and has raised $30k in seed funding so far.
