The rise of options, new players entering the market, older ones establishing and expanding, the globalization, the increased number of platform and accessibility altogether changed the buyer from a loyal customers to price-driven, chop-and-change shopper. Buyers today have numerous options to choose from and the availability is on the go. Thus why not make the best use of the resource and have the cheapest on the table. 21% of all consumers are “M-Shoppers” — who use mobile devices while in retail stores to assist in their shopping decision.
So what’s the driver for this incredible change? It’s called the price comparison site (PCS)—websites similar to those, that compare flights. We had been using makemytrip and yatra since ages to book a flight ticket as it offers options details and comparison. Similar concept has revolutionized the ecommerce market. A comparison shopping engine is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, and other criteria. A simple one-off entry of your budget, required features and location details into the website, and within a couple of minutes you are presented with a list in price-ascending order, the cheapest first, of all the brands of mobile quotes for you to choose from. Typically consumers will scan down this list until they find the best price, but from a brand they are comfortable with. From those listed most of the comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves.
Looking from a consumer’s perspective this is utopia—you get the cheapest price from a trusted brand without having to search and look up to each and every site separately or fear being up-sold. It changes people’s behavior from loyal to predatory and changes the whole dynamics of our market. There is, like most things, a downside, and it seriously affects the retailers reason being the pricing has to become more competitive and the sellers have to compete in a more volatile and transparent marketplace. This might also make them strip out the “value” of their product to compete on price, thus building a repair business and relationships is more difficult.
These can be looked upon as a more organised, better and online version of the Yellow Pages. As technology has improved, a newer "breed" of shopping Web portals is being created that are changing the features, the business model and the functionality offered. These sites do not "aggregate" data-feeds provided from the retailers, they search and retrieve the data directly from each retailer site. That allows for a much more comprehensive list of retailers and the ability to update the data in real time. Price comparison sites can collect data directly from merchants too. Retailers who want to list their products on the website then supply their own lists of products and prices, and these are matched against the original database. This is done by a mixture of information extraction, feeds, APIs and fuzzy logic and human labor. Another approach is to crawl the web for prices. This means the comparison service scans retail web pages to retrieve the prices, instead of relying on the retailers to supply them.
Mobile-assisted shopping is not an “early-adopter” behavior, but rather a behavior linked to the mainstream adoption of smartphones and their integration into consumers’ lives. In fact, there are ways in which a consumer with quick access to the internet may be more likely to make a purchase while in a store. Once price-comparison shopping could be done in the palm of one’s hand.
To make the cause easier we have PriceTree.com which is India’s largest price comparison website that allows you to find the best price online across thousands of online retailers in India. It’s also seen that about one-third of the total mobile shoppers have hunted for an online coupon while 36% of M-Shoppers regularly search for information on their phones for products less than $50. Supporting the above statement we made sure that you get the lowest prices on mobiles, computers, electronics, cameras and more with extra discount coupons. When M-Shoppers decide to showroom, the biggest drivers by far are lower prices (69%) and free shipping from the online retailer (47%). Thus PriceTree is committed to delivering the best price online across stores in India. You can even find your nearest electronics, gadgets, fashion and many more stores using PriceTree store locator. PriceTree.com compare prices, reviews, rating and lots more! Since we know that THE PRICE-SENSITIVES —DON’T PLAN, BUT ALWAYS OPT FOR DEALS