Shopping Guides and Product Discovery Platforms : Front Doors to e-commerce - Part1

It is an awesomely exciting time for e-commerce in India, with booming sales, strong brands and true technical innovation in the form of deals, shipping and payments. For the most part, customers are happy, companies are upbeat and investors are eager. However as the financials show and numbers prove, this happiness and supply surge is coming at someone's cost and these e-comm companies are burning the money to make the stakeholders happy, in the short-term. 

Let us assume everything is hunky-dory and each of these companies develop their own uniqueness, niche and their loyal customers. The segments could be in terms of verticals or some other dimension, on each of the platform. In a steady state, which is what, these companies hope to get to, pretty soon (12 to 24 months ?), the companies won't need to acquire traffic and customers through deals and other lossy offerings.  Sanity prevails and customers would start the more natural process of buying, which is 

    vague desire --> research --> selection --> buying destination

(contrary to the current state of  deals --> compare deals --> buy by price margins)

Hence, as soon as the deals dry-up and normal market dynamics prevail for the major part, we should start seeing a more logical/analytical buying patterns. This is when the product discovery and buy guiding sites would come in to play. IMO, while such service is not hard for e-commerce and other powerhouses to reproduce, the magic is that, these service got to show-up as a unbiased and independent service and hence they would play the true front doors for all of e-commerce that would be conducted within a geo or more broader.

I remember looking for a phone few months back with some preferences of OS and a specific budget in mind. The big G was the 1st stop (vague desire) to find more details and one of the top result took me to an interesting landing page (research step), which gave me a nice snapshot of some of the choices in my budget and gave me a sneak peak with a rating like score. (see right)

This looked like a wow to me, where a 3rd party site dispassionately rates a product on attributes that I care (OS/Battery/Camera or more) and assists in the simple yet effective process of logical buy decision. 

MySmartPrice Product Page

As I explored more such product discovery services, what caught my attention were two other portals. The first is mysmartprice and the second being buysmaart, which have their own uniqueness in the process of helping in a buying decision.  mysmartprice has a good view of "where to buy" and exhaustive specifications, but it seems be miss the selection and comparison of products.  However Buysmaart.com comes across as savvy/sleek enabling an easy compare and decide UX. However, buysmaart seems like a newer kid in the block and only owns the mobile phone SKU, as of now.

Sleek and Intuitive UX of Buysmaart

As these services seems to have nailed the process of steady-state buying psyche, we could even see a dramatic shift of shoppers starting at Google to a product discovery site like smartprix/buysmaart, in their journey of buying. I see these services playing the all important role of being front-doors that the buyers knock at.  

All in all, a great season for shoppers in India, where from the very thought of wanting to buy a product to service, accessories to second sales it is all, at the comfort of home and very competitive supply heavy market to shop from.,

Happy shopping and Happy Holidays !!