Mysmartprice.com – an online product comparison search engine today announced that it has raised 2 Crore VC funding from Helion Venture Partners & Accel Partners. We spoke to Sitakanta Ray, Co-founder of MySmartprice.com to know more about the funding and their future plans.
Q) Congratulations on your funding – Can you share funding details with us? (Optional)
We got a funding of about 2 Cr INR. As of today our earnings fund almost 80% of our expenses.
Q) MSP gets about 2 – 2.5 mln visits every month – Are the affiliate revenues enough for you to sustain and scale further? Do you have exclusive partnerships with ecommerce sites?
Affiliate + Advertisement revenues fund 80% of our expenses. Beyond that the funding takes care. We are working on building exclusive partnerships with ecommerce sites. Currently however, there are no such partnerships. The affiliate eco system is still to gain a major traction in India. We believe in future this would definitely happen, as in other geographies.
Q) What are your conversion ratio’s at MSP?
Currently about 15% of our users go to the various online stores. Beyond this it is the responsibility of the various online stores to convert users. We are seeing this number steadily increasing.
Q) Currently MSP is primarily into Mobile comparison – What are the other verticals you are planning to introduce?
We have been adding lots of new categories to our current offerings. Books, Cameras, Electronics are already available. Very soon we will be adding computers peripherals and mobile accessories. We are working on redesigning them in a major way. We also have a robust Coupons section and have recently added a Deals section as well. We will be adding lot more categories in the coming months and truly enhance the user experience.
Q) What are the new features in pipeline for MSP? and when will they get implemented?
We have already implemented a few interesting features for our users. We have added the Price Alert feature for mobiles, which let users, set an email alert for when the phone becomes available in their budget. In addition we have recently added a Smart Comparison feature that lets users compare two mobiles to find out which is better. For our electronics and camera categories we have implemented price and property filters to help users select the items better. We are working on improving our books section greatly. Currently our Books section shows the reviews from Goodreviews as well as a Google Preview for books (if it’s available).
New features planned over next few months:
- Mobile Access (WAP Site)
- Site Redesign
- More Product Categories
- More Stores
- Product Discovery features
Q) Currently, your biggest competitor is obviously Junglee.com – How do you plan to compete with Amazon’s might?
I think it’s important for us to focus on doing things well and doing them right. We must work on keeping our customers satisfied and let them do the talking for us. We would continue to grow organically. Junglee is indeed a big company funded by the largest ecommerce player, so we’ll have to keep our heads down and work hard.
6) Road ahead?
I would like MySmartPrice to be the first place people look for shopping advice. Be it what product to buy, which store to buy from or even get great deals that no one else can offer. We will continue to add more features that help this effort and add more verticals in the coming months.
We are a pure shopping Research platform and we would like to be the first name in that category.
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thanks for sharing this news.
it helps a lot.
I think user based price/deal submission is more effective then automated system search
Sites like Dealsquare.org or bunchh.com have user submitted price comparisons and deals which I think are better then an automated system!
Just my 2 cents