With all the portals online that provide effortless shopping experience online, it becomes difficult for the consumers to determine the best prices of their desired products. To make this task handy and simpler, Sulakshan Kumar and Sitakanta Ray founded MySmartPrice in 2011. MySmartPrice is an online engine that compares the prices of mobiles, books, electronics, cameras, and appliances thereby helping consumers make the best decisions.
Read this article to know more about MySmartPrice, how it works, founders, business model, revenue model, challenges, competitors, funding, wiki, and growth.
MySmartPrice - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | MySmartPrice |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Hyderabad, India |
| Sector | E-commerce, Price Comparison |
| Founders | Sitakanta Ray, Sulakshan Kumar |
| Founded | August 2011 |
| Legal Name | MySmartPrice Web Technology Pvt. Ltd. |
| Website | mysmartprice.com |
About MySmartPrice and How it Works
How was MySmartPrice Started?
Founders of MySmartPrice and team
MySmartPrice - Business Model and Revenue Model
MySmartPrice - Startup Challenges
MySmartPrice - Competitors
MySmartPrice - Funding and Investors
MySmartPrice - Growth
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About MySmartPrice and How it Works
MySmartPrice mainly helps users solve two basic problems: what to buy, and where to buy. So this platform facilitates the online shopping experience by providing product comparison. Also for categories like footwear and fashion, MySmartPrice has a range of filters like best discounts that help the platform to come up with a consolidated bestseller list with the popular products and their specifications. So all in all, the idea is to provide the users with the best deals but also provide information about all the deals.
So basically, what MySmartPrice does is that it lists the prices of all the products across top eCommerce sites. Because of the dynamic pricing models of the e-commerce portals, these prices are periodically refreshed by MySmartPrice to improve the accuracy of the product pricing. In the cases of extremely popular products, the prices are refreshed every 15 minutes.
This portal makes sure that all possible discounts are informed to the user with embedded coupons so that the user can make wiser purchases. The co-founders had initially started the portal with books and then they gradually moved to mobile phones, comparing prices of various stores. Soon the mobiles category picked up, this portal attracted over 1 Million users a month. The co-founders in the long run also plan to list every single product that is sold in the Indian online space, on the MySmartPrice website.
“If it is sold online in India, it is available on MySmartPrice”, says Sulaksha.
MySmartPrice is all about letting the consumers make a smart and informed decision about their shopping aesthetics. Hence it’s USP is the portal that lets them compare the product prices across all the major platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, ShopClues to name a few.
How was MySmartPrice Started?
"We had been planning an entrepreneurial journey for almost eight years but could not muster enough courage. Finally, we felt it was now or never,” said Sitakanta Ray.
Sulakshan Kumar and Sitakanta Ray met in 1998 when they joined NIT Rourkela. After taking their degrees, both the co-founders joined Oracle in Hyderabad. From there they parted ways when Ray joined IIM Bangalore and Kumar joined Infosys.
"Odd as it may seem, I spent time studying management but handled engineering and marketing, while Sulakshan pursued engineering but is today involved in management," added Sitkanta Ray.
What unites the co-founders is their zeal to take on their entrepreneurial journey. For both of them, their chance at the entrepreneurial journeys looked perfect with the price comparison/shopping research platform for the Indian market ideally because it involved the expertise of both product development and technology. And that’s how Sulakshan Kumar and Sitakanta Ray decided to launch their venture - MySmartPrice.
StartupTalky
Founders of MySmartPrice and team
MySmartPrice is founded by Sulakshan Kumar and Sitakanta Ray.
Sulakshan has a Bachelors's in Mechanical engineering. He is an alumnus of NIT Rourkela, and also has worked with Sitakanta at Oracle. Before launching MySmartPrice, Sulakshan had also worked at Infosys.
Sitakanta is an alumnus of the prestigious IIM Bangalore, with around seven years of working experience with big names Oracle and ICICI Bank.
MySmartPrice - Business Model and Revenue Model
MySmartPrice as a website allows users to take a detailed look into the best products ranging from mobiles, electronics, computers, fashion and lifestyle, cameras, books, appliances, and personal care. As we know that the price comparison engine on the portal enables users to find the best price, deals, and offers from major e-commerce stores.
So directly or indirectly, it allows users to access over 10 million products from more than 100 online and offline stores. MySmartPrice also provides exciting things like coupons, offers, gifts without hiding information. MySmartPrice gets revenue as a service paid for each successful transaction done through the portal.
This portal has partnered with a lot many online and offline stores and there it charges a commission for lead generation. With conversion rates going up, revenues also rise. More than 80% of the revenue for MySmartPrice comes from the affiliate income i.e., a commission from promoting affiliate products on the site, and close to 18% of the revenue is generated from advertising and online directory services.
StartupTalky
MySmartPrice - Startup Challenges
One of the major challenges MySmartPrice faced was when they started in 2010. This challenge was a limited budget. So to reach their target audience, it stuck to its core value of creating a robust product and focusing on Search Engine Optimization to get the first few customers onboard. This tactic really helped the company in developing a strong product range and retaining a large customer base.
There was one other challenge that the company faced in its initial days of inception. It was the very hurdle of attracting the right talent in the organization. However, MySmartPrice as a company never compromised on the kind of human resources it was looking for to build a team. To date, acquiring the right people continues to remain a big challenge, but the problem today is to choose the right talent rather than attracting more candidates.
MySmartPrice - Competitors
MySmartPrice has quite a few competitors in the market. For instance, Smartprix is perceived to be one of the biggest rivals of the company. Other competitors include companies Buyt, PriceRaja, Junglee, PriceDekho, MagicPrix, to name a few.
StartupTalky
MySmartPrice - Funding and Investors
To date, MySmartPrice is known to receive total funding of around $12 million.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Seed Round | $370K | Helion Venture Partners, Accel Partners |
| January 2014 | Series A | $1 Million | Helion Venture Partners, Accel Partners |
MySmartPrice is funded by 2 investors - Helion Venture Partners and Accel Partners.
MySmartPrice - Growth
Initially, the company had ventured into just offline listing. Soon it went on to online and offline listings in cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Delhi MySmartPrice claims to have offline partners generating business worth $2-3 Mn every month. More than 4 million users across the country make use of the service every month.
Link : https://startuptalky.com/mysmartprice-success-story/
Author :- Rishabh Rathi
July 11, 2020 at 09:00AM
startuptalky