ShoppingWish.in comes as another price comparison site; how is it different?

Sushil Choudhari, a former member of the founding team of the social music streaming site Dhingana, launched a price comparison site called ShoppingWish.in around seven months ago, although he has started talking about it formally only now. Choudhari partnered with Madhur Khandelwal, former software design engineer for Microsoft, to launch this new entrant in the price comparison space. Prior to setting up ShoppingWish, Khandelwal was also a part of the founding team at TheFind.com, a US-based shopping search engine.

The startup was launched in June this year and Khandelwal insists that in spite of a lot of players in this sector, the unique focus on design and inventory has paid off. "Within six months of launching the site, we have the most comprehensive price, availability and coupons database aggregated from 150-plus online retailers across electronics, computers, home & kitchen appliances, personal care, books categories," he said.

The home page of the site can be a bit confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, it is pretty easy to navigate. Users can search using different filters and featured products, along with their prices, are available on the home page itself. Once on the page of the desired product, the layout is pretty similar to other price comparison sites.

ShoppingWish competes with many players including Amazon's Junglee, PriceDekho.com and Helion and Accel-backed MySmartPrice besides vertical-specific price comparison sites like ThisYaThat, among others. But unlike others in the business, ShoppingWish doesn't do the transactions itself and redirects you to the merchant's site when you choose a product and seller.

It gets a cut on each transaction that is generated from the portal. "There are other ways of making money from the traffic on our site but we haven't explored those avenues yet," added Khandelwal.

In addition to price comparison, the site shows all available coupon offers at the product level, so that users don't need to search for coupons separately when buying online. Although Junglee has such coupons tagged to product information, given the much wider product basket of Junglee, all its products do not have coupons.

ShoppingWish also features 'deals' separately where the best prices of certain featured products are listed. Users can compare deal prices as well. According to Khandelwal, it is driving good conversion for sites like Infibeam, BuyThePrice (which has now turned into a marketplace) and offline electronics retailer Croma's online store.

In the recent months, many new players have sprung up in the price comparison space but the biggest player is Junglee.com, which enables users to find and discover products from online and offline retailers in India and also from its parent site Amazon.com.

(Edited by Sanghamitra Mandal)