Price-comparison, coupons portals gain from Google's fest

Amid hundreds of e-commerce websites running discounts, buyers take to these services to get best deals

With about 450 brands and websites offering discounts as part of Google’s three-day Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF) in India, buyers are taking to price-comparison, coupons and cashback websites in great numbers to avoid the tiring task of visiting each e-commerce portal to find the best deals.

A price-comparison website, also called shopping agent, shopbot or comparison shopping engine, is a search engine that filters and compares products being offered on several e-commerce portals, on the basis of price, features and other criteria.

A coupon website provides coupons that can help customers get additional price reduction on discounted rates. A cashback website is a type of reward portal that pays members a percentage of money earned when they purchase goods and services through its affiliate links.

DesiDime.com, which provides both price comparison service and coupons, saw an increase of three times in its unique visitors during the first day of GOSF on Wednesday.

Coupons and cashback website CashKaro.com, which works with over 500 online retailers, said it registered a 400 per cent rise in traffic, and its revenue rose 350 per cent, on Wednesday. The website’s average order value also rose — from Rs 2,000 on a usual day to Rs 3,500.

Gadget price-comparison portal 91mobiles saw a rise of around 20 per cent in traffic a couple of days before GOSF, as retailers rolled out teaser deals ahead of the event. During GOSF, the portal expects to get around 300,000 visitors a day — about 40 per cent more than its daily average.

“Among the several thousand deals and offers available, it is difficult for a customer to locate the best one on a particular product, say a phone he might be looking to buy,” said Nitin Mathur, co-founder of 91mobiles.com.

Another cashback and coupons website, Pennyful.in, is hoping to see an increase of four times in the number of transactions per day during GOSF, compared with its regular-day average. “We expect our revenue to increase three folds and the average ticket size to double,” said Ravitej Yadalam, chief executive & founder of Pennyful.in. “During the event, we also expect to see 30 per cent growth in new customers transacting on the site for the first time.”