Pennyful to add price comparison feature to India portal next quarter

Company is working on developing query-based price comparison search engine

Pennyful Online, which runs online coupons and cashback shopping website Pennyful.com in the US, is in the process of adding a price comparison feature to its Indian portal — Pennyful.in, according to its founder and chief executive officer Ravitej Yadalam.

“A query-based price comparison search engine is something that we are actively working on to add to our India portal.

Right now, we are compiling data from our partners and we should be releasing it in the next quarter,” he told Business Standard.

Launched in January 2011, Pennyful.com’s price comparison engine presently searches through 40 million products and provides the best price to its US customers.

Together, Pennyful.com and Pennyful.in had executed over 80,000 online coupon, discounts and real cashback transactions in the last one year.

While an average Pennyful consumer spent $1,200 in the US and an average Indian consumer’s spending was at $200 last year,

Yadalam said the number of times an active consumer in the US shopped during a given period of one year, however, remained almost the same as his Indian counterpart.

According to Forrester Research, the cashback market in the US was pegged at $256 million in 2012 which is expected to touch $281.86 million in 2013 and reach $456 million by 2018.

According to an IAMAI study, the Indian cashback market was at Rs 37 crore in 2012 and is projected to grow to Rs 50 crore this year and to Rs 152.6 crore by 2018.

In March, Pennyful Online launched Medicash.in, India’s first free healthcare cashback programme.

Medicash allows consumers to save on all their healthcare expenditure with associated healthcare partners across India through real money cashback or upfront discounts at their facilities.

The company currently delivers Medicash services to Indian customers from its Bangalore facility and its partner MyDocAdvisor’s Hyderabad centre.

Yadalam said that Medicash currently had its presence across 3,600 locations in 11 cities including Bangalore,

Hyderabad, Chennai, New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Pune. Medicash, which has 80 partners including Apollo Pharmacy, Religare Diagnostics and Fortis Hospitals, is now in talks with investors to raise less than $1 million to expand its reach into smaller towns and abroad.

“About 75 per cent of all health-related spends in India happen out-of-the-pocket (not covered by any insurance company or government aid), he said.

These customers, however, can save on these spends for free using Medicash,” he added. Though Medicash’s focus remained in India, they will likely look at Southeast Asia in the next six months, Yadalam added.