Online price comparison venture MySmartPrice adds offline retailers

MySmartPrice.com, owned and operated by Hyderabad-based MySmartPrice Web Technology Pvt Ltd, a product discovery and online price comparison shopping platform, has added an offline price comparison service for mobile stores in its home city.

It has tied up with over 300 offline mobile stores in Hyderabad and Secunderabad including Sangeetha Mobiles, The Mobile Store, Big C, Yes Mart, RSG, etc. Consumers can search and compare prices, discounts and deals being offered on mobile phone models by all the offline retailers listed on their site.

The firm has devised a location-based filtering method through which the prices of products from shops closest to the user's location will be displayed. The company said that it will soon start expanding to top Indian cities gradually.

"It is often observed that customers waste a lot of their precious time by browsing through innumerable stores to find the best product and price. Prices of phones vary significantly in offline stores and is dependent on the bargaining power of the customer," Sitakanta Ray, co-founder, MySmartPrice, said. "Through strong partnerships with stores, we ensure that customers get the price that only the best bargainers can get. This will not only save customers time and effort but also help them make an informed choice every time they buy a product," he added.

MySmartPrice was founded by Sulakshan Kumar and Ray as a part time project in September 2010. They quit their jobs and started working on it full-time from October 2010. Prior to MySmartPrice, Ray worked at Oracle and ICICI while Kumar worked with Oracle and Infosys.

It was originally started as a price comparison site for books, and later morphed into a broader price comparison site for products across categories. The platform lets users compare prices of products across a wide array of categories that include mobiles, electronics, computers, fashion and lifestyle, cameras, books, appliances and personal care. It was focused on sifting through prices being offered by major e-commerce stores in India.

Early last year, the firm raised $1 million in its Series A round funding from Helion Venture Partners and Accel Partners.

MySmartPrice competes with 500startup-backed PriceBaba.com which has a total of about 1,500 local shops verified and listed on its site across 11 cities. Interestingly, PriceBaba recently started adding online stores to its service, thereby encroaching on MySmartPrice. Now MySmartPrice is doing the same the other way round.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)