Tell us about how PriceGenie was started?
Well it all started like this! One day (Dec 2012) I decided to buy a TV, did my research; found the TV which I wanted and finally started to look for the best price. I googled about the TV and started to visit all the e-Commerce Stores which had the TV on sale. Then I noted down the prices and started searching for coupons for each store so as to know the best price I could get. In the end of it I realized I had spent around half day searching on Google, trying out coupon codes and still wasn’t sure from where to buy the TV. I even visited other price comparison sites, but found each site had some or the other drawback which made me not to rely on them. Some had very few websites listed, some had very old pricing and some did not have the TV which I wanted.
In the end I finally bought my TV from a store, but I had spend a lot of time on finding the best price. It was only then, when I realized that something should be done to automate this whole process and reduce the time spent to a few seconds. This was the beginning of PriceGenie! True story 🙂
There are a lot of sites that already provide a real-time price comparison of products across various categories focused on Indian market like BuyHatke, CompareRaja, MyPriceIndia, etc just to name a few. In such a crowded space how does PriceGenie stand out and what is the USP of the site?
Yes we are aware there is lot of competition in the market, but still feel that there are still drawbacks in many of the websites. Also the e-Commerce is very huge market in India, which is also growing at very fast pace. An average Indian buyer always looks for the lowest price before buying hence the market size is very big.
The main USPs of PriceGenie are:
- It tries to show the lowest online price, we do this by covering many e-Commerce websites. If you see our search result page we cover more than 40 websites. Our current algorithm make it very easy for us to cover a new website, hence we are able to cover a large set of ecommerce websites. We are doing this for all our product categories and not just mobiles (many competitors focus mostly on mobile).
- We show “TRUE REAL-TIME PRICING”. We don’t pre-index product like all other sites do and fetch price data once a day. Rather we fetch data on run time and show product price available at that instance or that very moment. Usually other price comparison websites have a fixed set of catalog (around 1 million product) and they fetch prices from e-Commerce sites daily. This is heavy on both the e-Commerce store and on the main website. We don’t do it this way which provides us an advantage.
- Our product catalog is not restricted like most competitors; you can search any product available online and we try to find out its current best available price.
- We are working on doing complete coupon code integrations as well, hence proving complete shipping experience.
How long has the site been live and how has the response been?
It was made live on 6th April 2013, but we started publicizing it only 2 weeks back, so it’s been active for 2 weeks now. Response has been good, we are getting a decent traffic from SEO as of now, plus reviews given to us by people on various forums have been positive.
What is your revenue model?
Currently we are not focusing on revenue, but it’s going to be based on affiliate model and ads. Our ultimate aim is to drive a major chunk of e-Commerce traffic through our website and earn from partnerships/ads from e-Commerce Stores.
About funding – are you bootstrapping or have investors?
We don’t have any investor and are self funded.
You are offering a lot of coupons across various e-retailers, do you have tie-ups with them?
Coupon code is not our main area of focus; rather it just adds an additional incentive for the shopper. We don’t have any tie-ups yet. Right now we take coupon codes from affiliate networks and pickup coupon codes manually.
What are the future plans?
Future plans are
- Creating a mobile app (Update: The mobile version is now currently live @ http://pricegenie.in/mobile/)
- Pricing Alert and Pricing Trends
- Improve our algorithms and provide better search results
- Creating a chrome plug-in to enhance shopping experience
- Expanding our product catalog and websites we cover.
About the team
Manish Prakash – Co-Founder
Manish graduated from IIT Guwahati with a B.Tech degree in Chemical Engineering. He has a total of 4 year of work experience, of which 3 year of work experience is on web development, mainly e-Commerce websites.
Manish, a programming guru, has been the chief mentor at Excellence Technologies and he and his team have executed numerous E-Commerce projects under his leadership.
An avid sports enthusiast, Manish has played at the National level Table Tennis for Delhi. He loves spending time reading and learning all about new technologies.
Kumar Mukul – Co-Founder
Mukul graduated from IIT Kharagpur with a B.Tech degree in Industrial Engineering. In 2008, he joined Headstrong in India which he later left to set-up Excellence Technologies. In his brief stint at Headstrong, he was involved in development of an application for a top I-Bank. He has been with Excellence Technologies since August 2009.
Mukul is an avid sports fan and was actively involved in table tennis and hockey during his school and college days.
What we think of PriceGenie
While PriceGenie does not bring anything new to the table in its current form but it does what it promises to do perfectly. The site is quite fast and responsive despite querying various sites for latest prices. Also the planned updates to the product also sound promising. Since online price comparison is still in its infancy right now, there is place and scope for new players and innovations. For now, we wish the PriceGenie team all the best in their endeavours.
