Note: Updated List of 25+ Group Buying Sites in India here.
Group buying sites are all over the place and every event i go to i hear about 1 more launching soon. Group buying or Crowd Bargain sites as they are called are eCommerce sites that leverage social networking to find enough other buyers to become eligible for group discounts. In the past month i have come across 7 startups that are trying to solve the same problem with absolutely no differentiation. All of them are getting the deals but are yet to get buyers. Most importantly, spreading Word of Mouth for local businesses through social media, which was the basic aim of these sites is just not happening (a little too early to say). Here is a look at them.
List of Group Buying Sites in India
1. Mydala (earlier coverage) – Currently available in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Launching soon in Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Pune. Over 15000 followers on Facebook. Deals are good and practically usable. Tie-up with iMint for shopping rewards.
2. Snapdeal – Currently available in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.Launching in Chennai, Hyderabad amd Pune. Over 9000 followers on Facebook. Deals are not impressive. Has a lot of moolah to spend but execution wise it’s a turn off.
3. Grabbon (earlier coverage)- Available only in Bangalore. A little new and has only 2000 followers. The deals are not too good to talk about. Having to pay partially online and rest during redemption has made it a little complicated for junta to understand.
4. Koovs – Available only in Bangalore. The follower base is about 1000. The deals are not valuable though on the face of it they tend to save you 70-80%. They are also stuck in the ‘pay partially online, rest offline’ model. The amount paid online is their share of revenue or service fee as you might call it.
5. Mobstreet – The latest kid in the fight is currently focused only on Mumbai. The only one with a different site design. Not much to comment as yet but the team is certainly enthusiastic.
6. Wanamo – After much delay they are finally launching on Friday. Founders have contacts with some follower-rich users on Twitter and FB so expect it to be the echo of the ecosystem. Should be interesting to watch out.
7. Group2Deal – Launching in Delhi sometime this month. The team is creating a little buzz on FB already.
All the above sites need to work on user education as the whole idea of group discounts is very new to Indians. Specially terms like ‘minimum sale before deal goes live’, ‘pay partially online, rest offline’, ‘extra ordinary restrictions’ are still alien to Indian buyers.
#Pi Special Group Bargain Deal 
I am sure there are many more clones in the making. The idea and business model is very much out and the key lies in execution now. Since everyone is focused at a different territory i would highly suggest you to sleep with your competition i.e. Tie-up.
There sure lies an opportunity here to launch an aggregator. What if someone can combine all of them? Also, how significant would it be to collaborate with a local search player or to use a local platform like Osutra?
Thanks to all these bargain sites expect a lot of deals (spams) flowing in to your social media streams.
Editor’s Note: Founders, #Pi will keep an eye on you. You better get good deals from Bangalore (Ashish), Delhi (Arvind) and Mumbai (Naman) for each of our star writers.
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He writes at The Inspire Blog]
Naman, thanks for the mention – we are certainly from the industry and plan to make a difference with our experience and network. However just wanted to clarify WanaMo is not a deal a day brand nor is it a group buying brand – we are a platform to explore unique things in your city & avail discounts on the best the city has to offer….that could take shape in form of an amazing deal everyday, or a deals search classifieds or well even a local search engine for that matter
We have taken pains to build a brand which foodies and shoppers can associate with – not in the game for quick money or easy success.
p.s – once again find your tone at times baffaling – what’s so stuck in the ‘pay partially online model??? its a beautiful model and we have considered going ahead with it too – if you can tellme a better alternative sure would love to re-consider
differentiation is in execution and how one envisions the segment and defines the brand/model – trust me we dont care if handful of quick fix me too youngsters decide to jump into the deal a day model – that’s good as like you pointed users/vendors need education – and what better education than bunch of competitors going around educating every1. Id say “Thanks”
agree to sleep with competition bit – leverage IMHO is the key to business success – the sum of parts in always more than the whole
Cheers
p.s – will keepup ur diktat of getting amazing deals. we launch in 8 cities soon btw, starting Mumbai on Friday
Abhishek,
One should always keep new ideas simple. For the consumers, specially Indian consumers it is important to keep things as uncomplicated as possible. By making it a 2 part payment it gets a little complicated for the consumer.
Also, Taking only Rs.50 for signing up for deal may result in default customers which is bad for your relation with the local business.
SME retailers survive on quick cashflow cycles, this model is better for them coz they get the cash directly from consumer at point of purchase unlike other model where there could be a processing timeframe of upto 8 weeks. + for the vendor this is a marketing platform not a sales platform at eod – so if a customer doesnt turnup its the customer’s loss of advance monney
to each his own, for us this worked better – always open for feedbacks and flexible to change whenever req
thanks for your valuable inputs once again
I guess the key here is execution. Most of them source deals through own contacts – and I dont think that model is scalable yet.
I also think the “sweet spot” is of importance here. What is the most lucrative deal which people will buy in a group? Honeymmon packages? TVs? Underwear?
Also the proliferation of such systems makes it very susceptible to late entrant aggregators like ixigo is for travel.
There are 3 more i know personally under development. So far i haven’t seen any interesting deal, this model is not scalable at all and its just mad rush seeing the huge fund raising round at Groupon.
I need a deal which can provide me LCD TV at 50-60% discount, anyone of these companies can crack such deals. Clinching deal is critical in this business model rather than making a very tech savvy portal and bringing deals with saving of Rs 100 or 200 from almost unknown restaurants/spas etc.
-Hitesh
http://www.vcbytes.com
Couldn’t agree more.
Most of deals anyhow seem to be grossly-overpriced deals brought down to more reasonable levels, at these sites, and none of them are the group-bargain deals like you see in China. In fact the most popular and successful group-bargain deals in China are not thru specific vortals, but simple facebook or other SNS groups. People join and leave at will.
There are a few more I see have already launched, its like everyday we come to office to find a new one trying their hands on this.I agree that Groupon inspires many here and the differentiator is clear – better deals + execution.
Personally I don’t have much confidence in the Indian Social Media scene currently. Its growing, but not enough at the moment to drive this business!
@Pratyush: No matter how the deals come in initially, if the brand is created – ways to scale will emerge automatically.
@Hitesh: Consumer Electronics market is something all these players are staying away from. But I am sure someone will crack that space aswell.
Disclaimer: I share office space with one of the above mentioned startups.
@Annkur: ‘Consumer Electronics market is something all these players are staying away from…’ !! Deliberately ? Why so ?
Razor thin margins in consumer electronics. Getting discounts on services is much easier than electronics.
@Annkur ‘Razor thin margins…’ could be true for low value consumer electronics, but for items like Home-Theatre, LCD/Plasma TVs etc., my impression is that the margins are huge.
Three years back, by sheer chance, I ran into a white-goods distributor, that too through a directory service. I purchased a refrigerator, electric chimney, home theatre from him, saving an average 20%, compared to the post-bargain price quoted by few of the leading stores in B’lore. On electric chimney, I got close to 40% discount. All large / established MNC brands. Not sure if things have changed drastically in last three years so much.
Hi Banibrata,
Interesting to note that you got a good deal for white goods. Actually I am planning to furnish my newly bought flat. Can you pls share the details of this distributor. Pls mail me dev_bablooyahoocom
Thanks
@Annkur – Dont think I agree to that. Each of the statements “No matter how the deals come in” and “ways to scale will emerge automatically” are loaded and have too many facets to be written so frivolously.
There can be a longer version of my statement aswell…..
For now just the fact that – people behind these ventures have a good background and it doesn’t matter if they get their initial deals using contacts and goodwill. If they have the initial 1000 / 10000 real customers made, they can pull deals from brand owners much more easily!
The objective of these portals is to aggregate the customers there by reducing the prices is appreciated. However most of them probably are successful in terms of getting customers together (especially when looked at the fan following base on social networking sites) but are limited to the services in the categories of food, entertainment and lifestyle/fitness.
Agreed that the service prices are getting lowered when the target number is met but a little dissatisfaction otherwise.
When we looked at the average order value of their offerings, it is about 600 INR (approximation looking at the deals on various sites). This is probably a reason why many of them are not into consumer electronics or for that matter any of the branded products where huge working capitals might be required to handle the operational costs.
If the product offering is limited to certain products or certain categories, then question arises about the scalability and longevity.
Doesn’t 24hoursloot.com fall in the same category?
I dont think so. That is mostly a pure ecommerce. Hardly to do anything with social media or local businesses.
Good article. Snapdeal.com guys have a pretty good deal in Bangalore today…3 tickets for the price of 1 on gokarting at torque.
Informative article. I completely agree with Shalini. SnapDeal people are really doing great in this field. I bought their Flying Fox offer, that was really thrilling. Even today, they have offered a an extremely good deal in Bangalore on GoKarting. They’ve offered Buy 1 ticket & get 2 FREE by paying Rs 150 only. It’s amazing.
Dear SnapDeal,
Please stop spamming.
And please learn a little about how to spam successfully. Dont use same email id and IP address in all the comments
.
Naman,
Apologies for the double posting. I hope you like today’s deal though. If you have any suggestions for the kind of merchants you would like to see on SnapDeal (for any of the cities), we would highly appreciate your feedback.
Cheers!
lol…
This is a good idea, probably compliments social buying ( where people take opinions from other members in social networks before buying and share reviews with others ). Perhaps, it already existed earlier in the form of corporate gifting.
Naman i have been following these players very closely for the past one month or so, and i agree that execution is the key. Don’t mind me saying but your review of the player seems utterly biased, your clear favoritism for a single player and ridicule of all the others indicates something amiss ( or more of a promotion ??)… anyways given the way these players are performing today i couldn’t pick one from the other. Too early to comment, let the customers decide
.
Sanjit,
Please tell me who am i biased to? Even i didn’t realise. Will ask them a referral fee.
Emails to you bouncing back.
He he i thought it was quite evident; anyways if you are trying to reach me then could you please try again also mark a cc to my hotmail account ( @hotmail.com )
(same id as the previous one)@hotmail.com
Dear Naman,
I completely agree with you that the key over here not only lies in your social media presence/Fan followings but how fast can you do horizontal integration with Associate websites to drive relevant/targeted traffic which can get you deals as well as conversion into sales…as you say sleep with the competition…But do this with your indirect competitors…give some thought to it.
While the business model is a clone of Groupon, I just noticed that the copying has gone much deeper in some cases. Wanamo’s ‘How Wanamo works’ video is a direct copy from the groupon video. The entire animation/slides have been lifted from Groupon. At least some effort should be invested in ‘brand-building’ as claimed by wanamo in comments above.
THis is definetely not good! shows that many of them have been just jumping into making some quick money!
Cool compilation Naman for my part i have used and liked Mydala’s deals and i believe the concept has potential in terms of lower cost of acquisition and the appeal of deals to human nature but the trick is to convert these followers into your site visitors and secondly keep the momentum growing i am already seeing the early momentum by Mydala going down
Another site based on group buying but with radically different implementation – http://www.groupndeal.com.
Unlike other websites, GroupNDeal provides you full control over your specific buying needs. Neither it forces you to buy from specific seller nor holds your money till minimum number of buyers in groups are reached and nor in any way forces you to compromise on your buying needs. GroupNDeal, truly and completely, provides you full control over your buying needs.
soo… what’s different again???
The main difference being, GroupNDeal does not brokerage between buyers and sellers. Checkout – Top 9 reasons to consider GroupNDeal @ http://www.blog.groupndeal.com.
Top 9 reasons to consider GroupNDeal @ http://www.blog.groupndeal.com.
Hope business grows for these gangs! By the way I am stunned to see same verbatim copy of FAQ in most sites? Assuming that these are all totally independant entities, it looks bit cheap to copy from another site. Not sure who made up the content first!! Even the “one liners” like “Bring a friend – share a little!” is repeated across all sites in FAQ
nice find.
all have copied from groupon.com
isn’t there a law against plagiarism? or content copyrights?
Well not only the business & FAQs page, but also the original article by Naman on Pluggd.in too was copied at other blogs and traditional media.
lol – Arvind
Hmmm i wonder where this would really succeed. ANyways, seems like indians got to start developing their own style and stop copying! First the IPL thnx to the EPL…and now others thnx to groupon!!!!
Hahah,
Don’t forget the copied hip hot songs….Regardless, same happens around the globe. Facebook copy cat in China. Flipkart copied from Amazon. Same seen in TV industry – Kon banega karorpati and now Indian Idiol..Mega success stories.
Nothing bad with copying…It’s business…
I think the differentiation lies in EXECUTION. How can you stand out. How can you create deep relationships and offer deep discounts and how will you scale rapidly leaving the competition far behind.
The race is on. In my opinion we’ll see a winner by DEC and at least 5 shops will shutdown in india by DEC as money runs out. Good luck to all
Another One Joins the race, this time it’s http://www.dealivore.com
which targets the Hyderabad Crowd. How many more clones of Groupon are we gonna see in the India Web Space??? Is it gonna be like 1 clone for each major city ??
Hey even Masthideals.com is very good and its very much userfriendly, Deals posted early every day, lots of free shipping bargains
Wooqer is another interesting platform for finding deals. However, it goes far beyond that. As you said : “Execution is Key”
http://www.wooqer.com
There is this site called http://www.snatchdeals.com that aggregates all such deals in one place. Just check it out..
After a long pause… here is the response. @Ali thanks for noticing us and talking of us @all thanks for reading thus far. We are http://www.dealivore.com – we love hunting deals
@ali We arent yet another group buying site(though i would to use that as our first startup was Yet Another Start Up YASU)-because we have a burden to bear, being true bootstrapped 2nd venture enterpreneurs is note easy.. That said, we are humbly learning-expanded now to 3 cities and will expand to 2 more in a month. Its an interesting market, but one must know that customer is da king – especially in the Indian context. We dont care if we have a bilion customers, but will live happy if we even have 10000. This aint a war and we want to get good customers. Happy to take feedback (just email us at support #at dealivore .com)
BTW before anyone gets confused, google around for YASU(Yet Another Startup). Well we arent funded to the tune of Rs 40 Cr but we fought ) against global giants with about $1 Billion in revenues..lets get going…
How is Snapdeal a group buying site? It does not depend on the number of people who subscribe for a deal..its just a sight which has a lot of deals..nothing to do with group buying
There are plenty of group buying sites mentioned out here. I’d like to mention another cool & upcoming “Group buying” site that I recently came across, Buytheprice, which is a Hyderabad based company.
Link to their site: http://www.buytheprice.com/
Wow! that’s a lot of deal websites. An interesting Indian daily deal aggregator i came across is http://www.checkalldeals.in
There is a really cool site http://www.mydealstreet.com/ … it is a very neat site .. i went to it and found many great deals .. categorization was good …
mydeastreet.com is also an interesting aggregator… However they need to bring more sites under their scope
mydealstreet.com is also an interesting aggregator… However they need to bring more sites under their scope
wow! thats a quite a lot of sites…some additions to this list from me
http://www.mastsale.com
http://www.sosasta.com
http://www.khojguru.com
this is something interesting, found a deals search engine which gets deals from all this site to one place…
http://www.gtoot.com... loving it…
its http://www.gTooT.com
Oh you’ve not yet checked out http://www.offertopper.com have you? I think that is the most user friendly of the lot. I just love the site and visit it everyday now!
I like it to..
Surely and aggregator is the need of hor and http://www.deals22.com seems to have spotted the opportunity well in advance and moved early.
This site is surely going the deals2buy way!
Please see another portal http://www.c2cguild.com. They provide buyers a platform to combine their demand in a given city for a particular Product. After registering, Buyers can contact other buyers having the same demand in his / her city. Then they can bargain better for this cumulative demand. This is free of cost. This is a sort of social e-commerce. This site does not sell anything and does not charge any money for registering. Must try.
et us examine the current process involved in crowd sourcing, the traditional way
An interested buyer visits a builder or broker and expresses his interest in buying a property. Salivating at the prospect of getting a sale, the broker/ builder make an already inflated offer. The buyer is vary of the quote offered to him. But due to limited information available at his disposal, he is forced to accept the rates quoted to him at face value. At the most, he is forced to seek the opinion of the “expert” property consultant / broker who has a clear vested interest in the sale of the property. At most, the buyer shall confer with a few friends before agreeing to pay the price at the quoted price. With the scales tilted in favour of the builder, the buyer is left negotiating some minor concessions, if any.
Contrast this with a situation where the buyer forms a group of interested buyers who can collectively bargain for a better deal. The builder would be more inclined to seal the deal at a discount taking into consideration the fact that a large deal would free up much needed working capital which could be deployed in other projects or repay costly real estate loans. In my opinion, this discount could amount to 10-15% off the rack rate. Potentially, on a property worth INR 1 crore, the projected savings could be as high as INR 15 lacs.
While high value purchases typically do not attract such concessions on a daily basis, distressed real estate builders will have a huge incentive in offering such schemes to an army of buyers / investors waiting on the sidelines to invest in properties at such bargain basement rates.
We are trying to revolutionise group buying in real estate group booking thru http://dealmela.in (site in beta testing phase)
In case you wish to join hands, call me on 9930996966 or mail me at property at dealmela dot in
Visit http://www.bonzodeals.com. Its currently offering Bus Tickets at flat 33% off…
Hi,
There is one more website which is about to launch with a group buying concept. But this website typically focuses only on the real estate sector. Real estate purchase and negotiation is a very tedious and time consuming process so this website called http://www.jhoond.com will get gr8 discounts on the new real estate projects being launched and also simplify the process of buying by providing end to end solutions.
The team for execution is very strong to 2 MBA’s from K J Somaiya institue of Mgmt, one from NMIMS and one Computer engg from SPCE. They have about 25 yrs of work exp in this field put together, so i think they should be smooth operators and hope that they bring out some good deals for us in this expensive real estate market.
found one more innovative solution in real estate space… http://www.groupbookings.in