MithaiMate – Sweets@ Your Doorstep
India is a land of festivals and frankly, we need no occasion to have loads of sweets. Mithaimate, banking on India’s love for sweets and the embedded culture of gifting sweets has launched their online store that enables that enables people to order sweets via their portal.
Mithaimate has partnered with few selected sweet shops (one per city, present only in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi) – customers can order sweets using the portal (accepts credit card payment) and the sweets are delivered by Mithaimate staff (within the same day or next, depending on time of order).
Service like this typically go very well with the NRI segment (costs are higher on the site, compared to what you get at the store –so local market is restricted) and there are tons of other websites that delivers the same service.
Infact, this a pure SEO game (to start off), and if Mithaimate has to compete with sites like infibeam/ indiagiftsportal, they better increase their inventory. Most importantly, bring a fresh feel to the overall experience of shopping mithai online is what can differentiate them (over the web1.0 feel of other sites).
What’s your opinion?
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
I absolutely love the idea. And I somewhat disagree with you Ashish of its being a pure SEO game to start off. Maybe if you are talking SEM, it makes sense, but for SEO they will require at least 6 months to build any keyword relationship with Search engines. And besides how many people searches “kaju ki barfi”.
They need to do following things, and I am sure they must be already doing or planning them.
1. Get onto SMS/Mobile.
2. Get more sweet shops.
– a. Get as much variety.
– b. Reduce delivery time as much as possible.
3. Get onto Facebook and Orkut. Just think friends sending mithai to each other on Faceook and Orkut on special occasions.
4. Create some viral campaign for initial traction, maybe letting bloggers install a button, through which blog readers can send blog authors mithai through their service.
And one more thing – I loved about them is that they use PAYPAL. This is something many Indian startups offering products can learn from them.
Ankit – I meant SEO. If you look at the bidding rates for queries like ’send sweets to india’ it’s quite high. Cos liek infibeam are purely playing a SEO game and that’s the discoverability (unless you have the money to burn into SEM).
Okay.. I wrote a long comment and lost it.. anyways.. here’s the gist of it.
Online services like these mostly have big players in it like Rediff and a few others.. What I don’t like about them is the clutter.. since a lot of things are sold on them. Its nice to have niche websites like these.
They should definitely incorporate some Web 2.0 elements like consumer feedback on the items. For outsiders, it would be nice to know which vendors and which items are well liked.
Don’t know if this site is associated with Amul or not, but if it isn’t, I see a future trademark infringement case against it. Mithai Mate is a brand of Amul (http://www.amul.com/cooking-mithai.html)
Awesome! I wasnt aware of this. I am sure mithaimate guys need to worry about this!!
Excellent niche idea ! Seems to have a great potential in the Indian context …
Thanks a lot guys for checking out mithaimate. We appreciate the feedback posted out here and will look into it soon .
i have been sending sweets to my home through a website called http://www.shreemithai.com for years… guess they are based out of madras , pricing is also cheaper compared to online stores.