Indian Online Retail: Deal Aggregating sites cropping up.

E-commerce in India is still in its nascent stages, but we are now seeing glimpse of things to come.

In US, online retail is pretty much main stream. By end of 2006 the US Online retail spending touched a whooping USD 130.3 billion and is growing at an average of 25% year on year.

By comparison India is far behind. The reason is that online retail is directly proportional to internet penetration in India, which currently stands at meager 3.5 percent of population. However, these numbers are estimated to grow at nearly 100% in coming years. Interestingly, the biggest share of Indian e-commerce goes to travel Industry. According to India online 2007 survey by Juxtconsult more than 51% of all online sales are travel related , more so Airfares. You may want to look at my comparative analysis of air fares on different travel portals.

Actually, the reason for this post was, I saw a couple of start-ups that have come up recently that make finding online deals easier for Indian consumers. I am not really sure how popular they are, but I am sure as the time passes, a lot of Indian consumers will find value in them. In US, similar sites like Pricegrabber, dealtime, deals2buy and slickdeals have been quite a hit.

Lets look at 2 of Indian deal aggregators:

Deal Maadi: I heard about this site couple of months back when it was launched. I have been visiting Deal Maadi every now and then. Sometimes, it does have some very good deals. They comprise of online as well as store deals. From what I see, it gets around 1 -2 deals a day.
Deal Maadi is a brainchild of Rajiv Renganathan. This seems to be a part time venture done by him. The site is based on Pligg, a open source application that is a near cousin of Digg. Deal Maadi depends on user contribution to get its deals. I am not sure what incentive the users have to post the deals.

The second deal aggregator, which I just came across today is Dealaajtak.

Dealaajtak looks like a professionally managed Indian deal aggregating site. I tried finding out more about company and people behind this start-up, unfortunately, no where on the site is there any mention of them.

One of the highlights of this site is that the deals found on this site are contributed by their internal editors. Also, they seem to be catering to online deals only.

Here is how they find the deals, in their own words;

Our dedicated editorial team looks for branded and quality products at different online stores. Our strategy:

1. compare the prices of that product at these stores.
2. look for availability and shipping time.
3. calculate product cost and shipping cost.
4. post the cheapest deal on our site.

In short, our motto is – “Post the Best – Leave the Rest“.

I see a lot of promise in both of these startups. We will wait and see how popular these deal aggregating services get.

Note: there may be other Indian aggregators, but I am aware of only these two. If the readers can point out, I will be happy to include them here.