Former Dhingana Co-Founder Sushil Choudhari, along with ex Microsoft hand Madhur Khandelwal have launched a price comparison website ShoppingWish.in. The search engine has price and availability data across 150+ online retailers in the country which thereby provides an easy way for users to compare prices of products across all online stores. The company has acquired angel funding from a Silicon Valley investor.
After Microsoft, Madhur Khandelwal was the founding engineer at TheFind.com, one of the largest shopping search engines in the US, based in Silicon Valley, while Sushil Choudhari was the co-founder at Dhingana.com, a music streaming website in India.
Speaking to India Digital Review, Madhur Khandelwal, Cofounder, ShoppingWish explained the objective behind the launch of the website, saying, “Our objective is to help users in making the right decisions on where to buy products online. Shoppingwish today helps them by providing information on who is offering the products at the best price. Over time, we will be adding more features that will help users in finding the right product at the right price.”
Launched six-months ago, ShoppingWish follows a different model than the existing players in the price-comparison online space, explained Khandelwal.
“A lot of players have come up in this space in the past few years but most of them have focus in the mobile category. We provide price comparison information across all categories. We have 1.5 million product offers in books, electronics, computers, personal care and home appliances categories. We also a comprehensive and always up-to-date coupon database and we show coupons along with the price comparison information so that users don't have to search for coupons separately when shopping online to get the best prices. We are developing the underlying technology in a completely category agnostic way. This will help us add more product categories like fashion, lifestyle very easily. Our overall approach is very technology centric, which will give us an edge over others as we scale the product,” he said.
Speaking on company’s marketing plans, Khandelwal further added, “We are following a multi-channel strategy in marketing our product. Using SEO we optimize our page so when users search for products through Google and Bing our website shows up on the top. We are extensively using social media to increase word-of-mouth awareness. Our Facebook page already has 20,000 fans where we post deals, promotional offers and messages to interact with our target audience.”
Madhur Khandelwal, however, declines any plans of the company to integrate e-commerce to its existing website as if now, “We are offering something which is unique in the market. The online retailing space is already crowded and it is being served well by many players. There is lot of room for innovation for price comparison and product discovery space that’s why we want to focus on this.”