With the growth of online-commerce in India, there are many businesses that have been built to cater to that explosive growth. With growing demand, there have been more startups emerging in the space of Customer Support, Last Mile Delivery/Logistics, Automation [e.g. Grey Orange Robotics]. This article in Economic Times points out that e-commerce firms are the new drivers for the BPO industry & with more startups emerging in that space, this number would surely see an upward-trend !!!

The following presentation from Accel Partners gives the complete outlook on “online commerce in India”

With the growth of e-commerce & “hefty” discounts being the major driver for sales, what if the consumer gets some more discount than what the e-commerce website is already offering. Yes, We are talking about “Coupon Websites” !!! Coupon/Deal websites are “by-products” of online-commerce.

In the past, we have reviewed multiple “Coupon Websites” but very few provide “Human Touch” to the overall “online shopping experience”. PriceBurp, an online coupon & deals website offers consumers with great deals across different categories [e.g. clothing, stationery etc.] on e-commerce sites like Flipkart, Amazon etc. & site that we recommend for another reason as well.

It has tied up with Akshay Patra Foundation & every time consumer shops with PriceBurp, the startup would contribute to “Akshaya Patra” [Read more about it here]. Definitely bring social angle to the overall shopping experience J

If you are looking for some great deals for your valentine, do give PriceBurp a shot !!!

With the increase of online frauds in India, it becomes necessary that “Shopper becomes Smart” & along with discounts also checks the authenticity of the e-commerce website. Some of the smart shopping tips are:

  1. Shop from “known” websites e.g. Flipkart, Jabong, Shopclues, High5Store etc.
  2. Ensure that “Digital Payment” happens over secure [SSL] channel
  3. Ensure “not to save” the Credit Card is not saved. Since, no matter how renowned, the website is; better to keep CC information to yourself !!!
  4. Compare prices of “existing products” on price-comparison engines
  5. Get additional discounts on products by grabbing coupons from coupon/deal websites
  6. Untrusted app stores will continue to be a major source of mobile malware. Traffic to these stores will be driven by “malvertising,” which has grown quickly on mobile platforms [Source – McAfee]

We hope that these tips help  not only make your online shopping more “secure”, “delightful” but also brings-in good “karma” 🙂

If you want to share any tips, please leave them in the comments section !!!

If you are an avid “online” shopper, I am sure that like many of us [including myself]; you would have definitely checked if there are any further discounts available on any product available online. In one of our previous articles, we had mentioned about “Insights into Coupon Marketing” & how coupons is an effective way to get more discounts from e-commerce websites !!!

In this article, we review a startup named Couponzdeal that plans to create a dent in the online coupon space. With overall e-commerce market expected to reach US $24 billion by the year 2015 with both online travel and e-tailing contributing equally [Source: Wikipedia], coupon websites or to be more precise “Coupon Aggregators” have a very interesting future ahead…

Detailed Review

Couponzdeal is a “Deal & Coupon Website” that provides discount coupons available for major e-commerce websites namely Flipkart, Jabong, Myntra, ShopClues, Amazon etc. UI of the website is simple & the overall search experience is good. Once the user registers on Couponzdeal, it provides you with a very simple Dashboard that keeps a track of your activity i.e. coupons applied, failed coupons etc.

Dashboard

Last Mile Coupon Sale

Apart from the offers on the dashboard, another feature which we liked during the review is Coupons Expiring Soon section. This gives the user hat-tip of the offers that are about to expire which in-turn might result in “last mile coupon sale” !!! We tried out couple of coupons & they did work !!!

CouponsExpiring

Scope for improvement

Customized User Experience

We created 2~3 login-id’s & tested out with coupons in different categories namely Clothing, Appliances, Travel etc. Though the coupons worked fine, overall user experience was the same. May be using the “Past Purchases”, “User History” & “Data Analytics”; it would have been better to provide unique experience to each & every user.

Sharing over WhatsApp/SMS

Though we could find option to share the Coupons over various social media channels; we could not fine sharing via SMS/WhatsApp [if that could be possible]. It would also have been very effective considering the increasing penetration of smart phone in India [& declining cost of 2g/3G data].

Availability of mobile App

We are sure that there would be a definite plan to release a mobile app [Android & iOS] but it would have been better to have a “Coming Soon” section which keeps the users informed about the same.

Given that the coupons that we downloaded & used across different categories resulted in 100% success 🙂 ; it provided a “Delightful experience” for us !!!

Do give Couponzdeal a spin & leave your feedback/suggestions in the comments section.