Excl: ShoppingWish.in raises angel funding from Sandeep Johri, others

Pune-based Wishpoint Tech Pvt Ltd that runs a price comparison portal in India called ShoppingWish.in has disclosed that it raised angel funding from Sandeep Johri and others. Sushil Choudhari, co-founder, ShoppingWish confirmed the development but refused to disclose the amount or other investors' names. He said a group of angel investors has participated in the round.

Founded in June last year, ShoppingWish caters to categories such as mobile phones, electronics, books and cameras. Talking to Techcircle, Choudhari said the capital was raised earlier this year and is used for product enhancement and gaining user traction. "We have seen immense traction in the past few months. Our user-base has grown more than 50 per cent since December last year and the time spent on the site per user is around five minutes," he said.

ShoppingWish was started by Choudhari, a former member of the founding team of the social music streaming site Dhingana and Madhur Khandelwal, who was formerly worked as software design engineer with Microsoft. Khandelwal was also a part of the founding team at TheFind.com, a US-based shopping search engine. Johri, one of the angel investors, is also a founding board member of Dhingana and a former founding member of Shopzilla, a US-based price comparison site. Johri is also a serial entrepreneur and venture advisor at Mayfield Fund.

When we spoke to the startup last year, it had listed products from about 150 retailers on the site. Choudhari stated that the number has now gone up to 175 and the total catalogue of product offerings is more than 3.5 million. "We have improved our user experience and launched newer features on the site. Our mobile app will also be launched in the next quarter," he said.

The new features on the site include reviews on the products, price analysis that helps buyers see price trends across different online stores compared with the lowest online price, integrated coupon experience that shows the price of the product after applying the best coupon available so that users don't have to go to coupon sites and then calculate the discount, and more. Choudhari said these new features differentiate the site from the existing players.

ShoppingWish competes with many players, including Amazon's Junglee, PriceDekho.com and Accel-backed MySmartPrice besides vertical-specific price comparison sites like ThisYaThat. But unlike others in the business, ShoppingWish doesn't do transactions itself and redirects the customer to the merchant's site when he/she chooses a product and seller. It gets a cut on each transaction that is generated from the portal.

Choudhari said in the coming months the firm would like to venture into more categories such as fashion and lifestyle. This would put it in the league of Junglee which operates in all possible categories. Though many players have come in the price comparison market lately Amazon's Junglee remains to dominate it. Will this native player be able to displace Junglee's popularity with the help of its add-on features?

Share your views with us.