Now that we have quite a few book buying sites in India, it’s quite natural that there would be a need for aggregator play and bring in the much needed “check” on price across book ecommerce category.
MySmartPrice is a book comparison engine for India. The portal gives an aggregated result from 10 online book sellers including established players like flipkart/Infibeam and newer ones like FlipGraph. The UI is neat and simple for now and solves the pain. Though on the speed front it does take a back seat as the obvious comparison would be with Google. I have been using Google shopping search for quite some time and it is pretty good, though not so structured. That said, MSP’s auto suggest feature is fast enough as they pre-fetch the common queries and store it locally.
MySmartPrice does a real time search of all the stores and hence so much of time. May be they could consider pre-fetching the results as well and store it on their server, if the policies allow that. Ixigo also suffered on the speed front in initial days due to real time fetching but have improved a lot since then.
The team will be looking to list second hand sellers and offline stores and libraries in due time. One obvious monetization for MSP is through affiliate commission. The team is also looking to make a analytics product around the real time demand data that they would have.
Iglooo is a similar product which now seems to be abandoned as the team got busy with something else.
Do give MySmartPrice a spin and share your views.
Related Forum: Need feedback on MySmartPrice started by the co-founder .
Recommended Article Series : Ecommerce in India
Note: If you are a startup looking for product feedback, ask the startup community.
UPDATE (9/9/2010): MySmartPrice has started caching common result queries and now the speed is lot better. Things will get even better i guess with increase in search volumes.
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
