Launchpad
PriceCheckIndia
Company Name PriceCheckIndia.com
Mission Best Price Comparison Engine Aimed to Assist Online Shoppers
Overview

PriceCheckIndia has been started with the goal to help make shopping effortless for common people, specially while purchasing big ticket items. Currently margins charged by some of the retailers are way more than others and one has to scourge through Internet to find the best price / deal. We developed PriceCheckIndia to help shoppers by providing a one-stop E-shop for price comparison. We believe in thorough comparison in order to provide complete confidence to the consumers, that’s why we retrieve prices from top 15 online stores. Furthermore price is not the sole deciding factor on where to buy the products from, so we also show the freebies/deals various stores are offering. Prices combined with deals/offers enable consumers to be able to truly compare the store offerings. As stated in our mission statement, PriceCheckIndia is bound to get you the best deal; it’s the only one site you need to visit before buying a product to get the best deal online.

We also aim to assist the shoppers in their research process. So if you are looking for an Android mobile phone which has full qwerty keyboard along with GPS and Wifi capabilities, you just search for  "Qwerty + Android + GPS + Wifi". Similarly search for "HD Video + DSLR" if you want a DSLR camera with HD Video. Shoppers can type in whatever features they want and our smart search will present them with the most relevant products with the best available deals. By using PriceCheckIndia shoppers no longer need to fumble their way through with inefficient complicated filters or go clicking all over internet for finding the best deals. We believe in easy accessibility and ease of use and our regular users have confirmed that the portal delivers to that promise very well.

PriceCheckIndia also facilitates user reviews and question-answer sections for those researching. You should clear all your doubts before purchasing a product by asking questions on product page. This collaborative community knowledge base just gets better with time. We already see some genuine questions coming in on a daily basis and get answered within hours. Last but not the least PriceCheckIndia also provides store reviews and ratings by fellow shoppers. We believe such a shopping comparison portal can be a game changer in how we shop.

So in nutshell PriceCheckIndia is a one stop destination for all your shopping research needs.

Launch 12 January, 2011
Founder
Puneet Gupta

Punit has around 7 years of experience as a senior manager in a technology start-up in US. Mid 2011, he decided to move back to India to pursue PriceCheckIndia full time. Punit is a graduate of IIT Guwahati and Georgia Institute of Technology USA. Punit is handling the marketing and business development for PriceCheckIndia and aims to make PriceCheckIndia THE go-to place for online shoppers.

Rahul

Rahul has vast amount of experience in software design and development. Rahul is the mastermind behind all the technology in PriceCheckIndia. He is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur where he specialized in network security. Rahul is a very passionate programmer and likes to control the bull by its horns.
Location Bangalore, Karnataka
Team 3
Segment Consumer Merchandise
References
1) Business   
The business has potential, given that india has a huge consumer base with it expected to have the highest spending population within the next 25 years! Everyone loves a good bargain, so yes, PCI would be well positioned to help the consumer find the best deal from amongst all online vendors. The best deal here being not just the lowest price, but also what's on offer alongside the product. Who doesn't like free stuff?
Sure there is risk, given that PCI has competition from the early-mover-advantage company MySmartPrice (and possibly some others), but having seen MySmartPrice's interface and functionality, I feel PCI is better positioned and also has the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes of it's peers.
2) technology platform
The platform could/should be a LAMP stack for the front end and database connectivity, but PCI may/will also need something more powerful such as perl or python in the backend for all the data crunching, web crawling and data mining.
 
3) commercial goals of the company which we can carry. 
Currently free service is the best USP, and this should continue throughout the life of the product. Monetary benefits can come from the following over a period of time:
  1. Having sufficient traffic through the site and hence placing relevant advertisements around the latest gadgets
  2. Tying up with the various online vendors to provide PCI a cut of the business, since PCI would be a great lead generation tool for these vendors
  3. Bringing 1 deal directly from PCI (through some vendor) per day, or per hour (something like snapdeal.com or something such).

-- Hemanshu Narsana, UX design lead, Langoor