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 writes at The Inspire Blog]
Don’t consider Iglooo abandoned just yet. We may not have given it as much love as we would have liked, but a major update is around the corner
Not loading on chrome. Also checkout http://www.indiabookstore.net
Nice! A much simpler and quicker alternative to MySmartPrice.
Yup, IndiaBookStore is definitely better. Makes me wonder why that wasn’t reviewed instead.
I just tried Indiabookstore.net and the site sucks big time. I do not know what the guy is thinking. It gives me 20 books even when I specifically search for a particular title. Even iglooo performs much better.
ha ha, my adblock blocked the entire page, wow, awesome!!
checked out.. Altho infibeam has a lower price, but “regular customer” would prefer a website where he gets all stuff.. Flipkart has a huge collection. Infibeam need to update on that.. So people like me, wud still stick to Flipkart
nice work Sita….neatly done..!
@009 – comparison sites are meant to work in cases when you have specific book in mind…not for book recommendations. So while Flipkart may have a huge collection, it really doesn’t matter when I’m just looking to buy one particular book (at the cheapest possible rate).
@ Sanjay: well, that is what i mean.. When I need to compare the prices of a book being provided by 2 sites, the basic condition is: the book should be available at both the stores (web stores in this case). And when something is not available @ Infibeam, the only option i have is to buy it @ flipkart
“Iglooo is a similar product which now seems to be abandoned”
me too shocked by this comment. I still use it.
end of the way, I go to flipkart anyway. So I feel I don’t need to compare prices anyway
@Rakesh Thanks for the mention. Naman.. consider adding IndiaBookStore.net to your post too. Give it a spin yourself.
Note to MySmartPrice guys:
Your logo-caption needs a question mark (?) after ‘Why pay more’.
interesting
?
The site does not even work on my FF installation. As another commentator mentioned, perhaps it is AdBlock. But that sucks..
try this… http://isbn.net.in/ its developed by Swaroop as side project. He currently works at Infibeam.
Nilesh
dont get me wrong, isbn is cool and i know created by geek.
smartprice is cool and as i know copule of more friends are extending non-book price compare (and may be Mobile Access !!!) and what i think is if you try smarprice you will realize it is cool user experience.
i am not yet sure what is business model, but still looks very interesting.
isbn.net.in requires isbn, which is not so user friendly for normal users to remember.
You can search on Flipkart or Infibeam for the book you are looking for and then click on the isbn.net.in bookmarklet (available from the http://isbn.net.in homepage) and it will directly take you to the page with all the prices.
Ecommerce stores are spending good effort in tuning their search engines, don’t see how I can do better than that, so leverage it instead
@benjamin – its not that the startup has shut down, its just that there is no active development (thats why we use the word abandoned).
@Nilesh – like Raxit said, it mandates one to remember the ISBN number – which is too much to ask for.
ohh yes this is superb..did any one try buying?
@naman,
Thanks for the mention. About the speed front, we are already doing a 24 hour caching. Try to search one particular book twice to see the impact. Till enough users start using the site, I should get an automatic caching done during night time, I guess.
@Rakesh, Gowthaman and AJ, the site makes extensive use of javascript. That may be the reason why it does not work with adblock. Thanks for the catch. We shall work on it right away.
@Sagar, thanks for the suggestion.
@Sanjay, Raxit and Sheetal, thanks for the encouraging words.
Finally I will like to point the biggest strength of the site that is not yet obvious. The site is created in a way that it will automatically keep getting better as more people use it. The auto suggest will keep getting more relevant and the caching of the result page will keep improving.
@sita
why not to provide option for second hand book or e-bay+amzon result search + Google product search as well ?
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@Raxit,
Lots of additional features are on the pipeline. But we want to get the base functionality perfected first.
Btw, lot of people have questioned the relevance of the product per se. I have jotted down my thoughts on the topic on my blog as a post titled relevance of mysmartprice http://www.mysmartprice.com/blog/the-relevance-of-mysmartprice/
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