AllIndiaDeals : Cheap(er) deals online

Ever thought about how much proportion of the massive Indian population shops online?The answer to this question would soon follow.There are not many Indians going online and shopping but the trend is soon changing.One of the most powerful revenue models in the internet industry is advertising and you can find an explanation to these terminologies from Anurag Gupta's Blog

Just search for "Online Shopping in India" in Google and you would be surprised to see 19,800,000 results.With so many shopping portals in place,the choice of any one of them becomes difficult and leads to the following questions:

Q. How much percentage of the massive Indian population is connected to the internet and what is the growth?
There are 38.5 million Indians online today. The Internet offers an audience that will grow to a 100 million users by 2007-08. Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) forecasts that e-commerce transactions will cross the Rs. 2000 crore mark (2006-2007) which translates into an increase of over 300% from financial year 2004-05.

Q. Where is India with respect to Online Shopping?
Google has a very interesting study about the online shopping trend and where is India compared to other countries in the world.Well,definitely from the trend,we can say that India has to catch up

Q. Which are the different players and what different strategies selected few are following?
I just happened to see some of the sites mentioned in the Google search
a. Ebay India
b. India Plaza
c. IndiaTimes Shopping
d. I'm Wanting
e. FutureBazaar

Just kept me wondering,is there any place which provides me the best of the best deals online?.This is where I came across AllIndiaDeals , a shopping portal with a difference

What is special in AllIndiaDeals?
a. As mentioned in my previous post on CampusChai, from a naive user point of view,the user interface of a site is very important.The end user does not want a site cluttered with Ads,which makes life difficult to search for the actual content.AllIndiaDeals have got their fundamentals of web programming correct and have provided an excellent user friendly interface.

b. AllIndiaDeals is a place where you can get special discounts on any product which is called as "Lists Price" and yes,the discounts are also very high.Have a look at the discount in the image below
c. Finally,users can find their favourite content at a cheaper price without searching on different sites which is the biggest USP of AllIndiaDeals.Take the same example for "Airfares in India" and it is difficult to know the comparison of fares(of a single flight) offered by different online travel portals like MakeMyTrip, ClearTrip etc on the same flight.But there are players like Ixigo(which was showcased in Proto.in) which has understood the changing consumer needs and this would soon be a reality.AllIndiaDeals also falls in this category and they have trult understood the changing consumer needs.

Strategies AllIndiDeals need to employ for further growth:
a. It would always be more difficult to convince the Indian audience to go online and shop and this is where the entire team of AllIndiaDeals has to take a plunge and try to be more innovative not only in their idea but also the approach.Remember,Indian audience is very different from the US audience and this is where their should be and remain in future.

b. With so many players coming into the online shopping market(compare this with "A Blog is born every half a second),competition would be tougher and keeping the same service(maintaining the excellent discount offered on items) would always be a challenge.

c. It is becoming extremely important to understand the SEO fundamentals since,search results are becoming more and more important.It always helps being in the sponsored link in Google Search. eg. My blog got more traffic when Google search results for "Himanshu Sheth" had my blog as its first result(now I guess my blog comes at the forth place)

d. In this Web 2.0 age, it has become more and more important to use the power of Social as well as Business networking. Social networking sites like Orkut,Yaari,MingleBox and Indian business networking site TechTribe(which would also be helpful in getting funds) would definitely help to get more traffic as well as scale up the business of AllIndiaDeals.