India is a land of crazy sports fans and we boast of a top notch cricket team, world chess champ and of course, the vast number of street players and ‘self-acclaimed’ sports pundits.
Inspite of a strong demand/market, there is not a single portal dedicated to buying sports accessories and related stuff in India – a case of low hanging fruit?
Playgroundonline.com is a Bangalore-based startup and is bringing the buyers and sellers closer. Currently, they offer sports apparel, footwear, Books/Videos, Gaming and related products for sports fan in India (free shipping).
PlayGroundOnline has tied up with several suppliers and have launched branded stores too (like Cosco, Stag)
The site is nicely done and the team has gotten a good inventory of products; and is also planning to build more interactivity (community of sports lovers) by providing an arena for users to interact and express opinions.
My only feedback to them is that billing and shipping address need not be different for consumers (I know that one of the co-founder is from e-procurement industry, and this is a common practice in a typical B2B industry).
What’s your take on PlayGroundOnline?
tags: playgroundonline
Hi Ashish,
Just a quick comment on the billing and shipping address being different: It is quite useful in cases like gifting or micro-corporate purchases (which, I suppose, is also a part of the target consumer base).
Regards
Manasvi
@Manasvi – I understand that use-case, but if I were to design the product I’d design in such a manner that user doesn’t have to wonder what the heck is billing address..
These are pull-in features, i.e. show such stuffs only when user wants to see them – not to every one!
My 2 cents.
@Ashish : Isn’t it standard to have a separate billing and shipping address ? Billing address is supposed to be the address registered on your Credit card (thats one of the validations done by the CVV no., IIRC). Also, I would tend to think, Billing and Shipping and pretty self explanatory.
Oops forgot to bicker and complain
. Awesome site and concept. However, the site did not render properly when viewing from a Linux box with Firefox (The menu drop downs were hidden by the Huge Flash image on the front page). It worked fine on Windows with Firefox.
Raseel – This is a pure consumer site (with some angles of corporate gifting)..- so if you are paying by credit card, why do you need to metion the billing address? And CVV no. has no relationship with billing add (trust me on that)
My point regd that statement in the post is very simple – build for 80% of your users (i.e. consumers), for the rest, hv advanced settings.
I will passon the linux+FF feedback to the team.
Basic qn – if you are paying by credit card, why do you need a billing address?
And raseel – i dont think billing address has anything to do with cvv etc.
Overall, a great site and very neat implementation! Willl keep checking them for new stuff
Ok, my bad about the CVV. It is not directly used for verification of billing address. But apparently an AVS(Address Verification System) is in place , which, alongwoth the CVV2 number helps in preventing fraudulent transactions.
Basically, billing address is required. A must. It is associated with your Credit Card. The Shipping address can be different.
Separate billing and shipping address is pretty standard, I think. The most common use case is gifting. Buying it using a friend’s credit card or maybe getting it delivered to a different home are other possibilities frequently encountered.
If shipping address is different from billing address, ideally the credit card company should call up the customer to verify that the transaction is genuine. Thus it makes sense to get this information from the customer in the first place.
Personally, I prefer if an online merchant asks for both the addresses in addition to the credit card number and CVV. This prevents transactions on stolen credit cards.
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Many new online gaming sites have come up.
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Some of the latest that I came across are from Zapak.com.. Zapak is has now launched games even for the mobile platform. Given the mobile phones penetration, this is a huge add-on. Now we can easily play games while commuting etc.. Just loved the way they have structured the games in this category.
Here is the link
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