Shopping In A Hurry

There has been frenzied activity on the Net in India with new initiatives being launched everyday as nobody wants to miss out on what's perceived to be the fastest moving virtual chariot-wagon. Dot.coms after dot.coms are mushrooming in every nook and corner of cyberspace and the numbers just keep growing exponentially.

We now start a series looking at these Indian websites and try separating the mice from the men and the wine from the water.

Jaldi.com

Pick up your shopping cart, and wheel it in and around the portals of what has been a heavily advertised online shopping superstore. With products under every possible head that you could ever need, Jaldi.com has a host of other features that add value to your virtual shopping experience _ the facility to pay by American Express cards, loans and finance, and even help with insuring the products you will thus buy.

 

For instance, you go to the household section, you will get airconditioners, dishwashers, gensets, refrigerators, fans, washing machines, sewing machines, garden tools and even mattresses. If you are interested in buying a refrigerator, you can customise your search on the site for the type of fridge you want (say, you want a 190 litres, frostfree Samsung within Rs 9,000). The search engine will throw up what fits your requirements instantly with more details about the machine than you'd probably get if you went shopping in a real store. It's also possible to view the product and if you want to look for other options too before making a final choice, you can save the comparisons that you have got so far to decide later.

The site's coverage of products is extremely comprehensive as it has gizmos and contraptions under the heads of kitchenware, electronics, personal care, health and fitness, games and toys, sports and outdoors, lifestyle, stationery, provisions, computers and gifts.

You can access information on loans and finance options for your purchases by applying online to the finance providers such as ICICI Consumer Loans and Countrywide.

The site also keeps you clued on to the best subscription deals around for magazines and newspapers. And you can also create an e-mail address for yourself here and check your mail away from the maddening hotmail rushes. The site is a quick loader, but not very visually pleasing. The whole experience of shopping online could have probably been done more creatively.

Koolmaal.com

Koolmaal is touted as India's total auction site, where you can buy and sell virtually anything, or should I say, virtually buy or sell anything?

If you have anything to sell, first you register on the site giving your personal details and then fill in details about what you want to sell, after which you will be allotted an item number. And all this for free!! The item number will help you track your item's status and check out how many bids have been made for it. You are supposed to give a final date for bidding to close the bids and when the date comes, you can contact the bidder you choose and finalise the terms of the deal.

You can put up photographs of your product on the site too. There are two ways you can do this _ either use html to create a link to your image (if it's already on another website) or send the snap to the Koolmaal office in Delhi and they will put it up themselves.

If you have an afterthought about the whole idea, then you can go back and change the starting price/quantity of your item or even stop the item altogether from the auctioneer's block.

If you are interested as a buyer, you can look up the products available under heads such as antiques, movies and music, real estate, watches, vehicles, phones n' cellphones, clothes, industrial products, etc. and bid for what you like.

The site claims that it is the `koolest desi site where you can make maal', but funnily enough, a link that they have to success stories of people who have made money on the site is still under construction. Get the message?