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Startup : An Idea can change your life.

By Himanshu Sehgal on 22 Comments / 1477 views

Hello Rodindhoods, 

It’s good to be a part of THE DOERS community. The aim of this post is to get your views on what’s cooking up in my head and laptop day and night. So here it is.

While i was looking for shoes online, i realized that there are way too many website offering online shopping in India. Too much of e-commerce shit. Many of them we know already, and some of them we don’t. Some of these websites deals with a particular products like perfumes, shoes or jewellery, while other covers everything possible. So i sat down and decided to list all possible online shopping websites in India. After a while i realized i m wasting my time as the number is huge. And this is where my mind met the MR.IDEA. 

*I remember ALOK sir’s post where he said: every other guy i meet is running some e-commerce website. Now i realized how true is that.  And I m surely not planning to start another e-commerce website struggling to sell cloths and shoes online. Here’s what cooking up in my laptop.

IDEA (this was 3 months back): 

Friend: The concept of malls is a big hit in India and so is the online shopping portals. I think we should go e-commerce. Himanshu ?

ME: Drop it.  

* silence*

ME: Listen, Why not to mix both?  We can come up with ONLINE MEGAMALL : Covering all online shopping portals. From myntra to the website selling cakes online, from jabong to the website selling  motor parts online. Everything. From little ones to Big Bs. We will not sell any products, we will bring sellers together. Just like a Mall. A mall doesn’t sell products, a store located in it does.A Mall provides space to sellers, in the same way we will provide space to all portals running online. That way it becomes easy to explore online stores. 

Friend: Bingo!!! Let’s do it.

What was next? we decided to bring it to life. Design is almost done. But we are stuck now. We don’t know how to take it forward. To list each and every website, do we require their permission? what can be done ? how can we list each and every website? we have done no market research or anything. please guide us.

Also, we forgot to take any reviews on this startup from people or anyone around us. So i decided to post it here. Please share your views on the same and help us. 

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22 Comments

  1. are you trying something like junglee.com?? that is listing products from other sites and then redirecting to their pages when the visitor clicks for that you have to:

    1) try contacting them and request for data as a feed in JSON/XML some sites offer it to all for free 

    2) poll their server at regular interval update your database (ie with latest product prises avalability and all )

    3) search algorithm and full text search implementation like sphinx

    try building a screen scrapper (search google for “screen scraper”) that can have legal issues 

    all this is moderately complex feel free to contact me if you want more technical details/help .all the best the idea is nice if you can implement it in a good way and market it a bit i believe it can be successful

  2. Hello Abhishek, 

    We are not going to access APIs of any website. We are just going to list them and direct user to their home page according to product they are looking for. This is how they get benefit from us. Customers. What is a MALL? A place where people can explore, eat, shop, cinema and more. We are bringing it online. We are going to list each and every website selling any product. Not online big ones like snapdeal and flipkart. But every website struggling to get noticed online. Being a SEO, i know how difficult it is to rank on google’s top page. And if you manage to get ranking on google. You get rewarded too. But what about websites who struggles to get positioned on Google? They remain unnoticed. So this is how it is going to work. 

    Yes it is a huge task, but not a impossible task. 

  3. Hello Swapnil, 

    Junglee is a different concept. They compare prices for various products online. We have something different. We will list websites according to their niche and direct users on their home page. Not any particular product or brand. 
    For example: 

    I want to know which websites sell cakes online. So i can go to this website and see each and every online portal selling cakes online. This is how every business will get noticed and equal opportunity to attract customers.

  4. The idea here is called “e-commerce aggregation”

    Its a great idea Himanshu! There are a lot of sites like these in the western world but very few or none in India that channelizes their SEO expertise to help fledgling websites. Perhaps you can prove your effectiveness over time and then charge a small fee for listing on your site.

    You do not need permissions to list other e-commerce websites as they are all mention hungry and will gladly have you show and redirect to their websites through yours as long as you do not tarnish their image by stretching their pictures or destroying their identity by saying something they are not or misrepresent them.

    If you can show that you are driving traffic to their websites they will be more than happy to help you with greater information.

    Wishing you all the best!

  5. I don’t get it. Calling it ONLINE MEGAMALL doesn’t help either.

    What are you trying to solve ??
    Let’s say you start onlinemegamall.com with listings of all the online stores.
    1- Now… a user wants to buy something from flipkart, you want him to goto your site first, find flipkart and then you’ll direct him to Flipkart’s home page. C’mon man ! Is the user so dumb ?? He’ll just got to flipkart directly.

    2- You don’t serve price comparison, now .. If user wants an iPad, you’ll show him all 300 stores selling iPads. How does the user decide where to go ? you’re actually creating more trouble for the user by sharing 300 sites for one iPad.

    3- Everyone knows flipkart, myntra, jabong …. other 297 stores. How will they come to know that thr is a new time-consuming  way to visit shopping sites via onlinemegamall.com 
    You’ve got that much money to make everyone aware about this awesome mall ?? [Don’t tell me, listing every site on onlinemegamall will show you top on Google search results]

    I don’t think this is a great idea.

  6. Why do you visit a mall ? For shopping, eating, fun and cinema. We are not going to list only websites selling cloths and gadgets online. We are trying to list online stores selling any product. 

    Can you tell me how many sites are there selling cakes online in delhi-ncr ? or how many sites are there selling perfumes online in India? Half of them are struggling with SEO to get a good rank on Google and get noticed. We are trying to help them.

    First, Making people aware of this mall is not a tough job. Second, who said it will help us rank better on Google. You didn’t get it right.

  7. Thanks Pawan. I hope we will end up helping various websites struggling with SEO.

  8. Alright, now I get it. 
    Its a megamall for poors. Stores struggling with sales, all in one MALL.
    Its different.

  9. Looks like a good idea. Only problem I see is that users are not comfortable to buy from a website which they never heard of ( if the product is available on well known sites like flipkart , bla blaa ) . If a new site comes as search result on Google; user still feels it is bit authentic.. For example, what you are trying to do is something like gosf.in which google launched few months back.. That was still moderately successful as it had Google brand associated with it.

  10. Hi Himanshu, I respect the fact that you are thinking about an idea, but before you implement it, I would suggest, you should try working for an online portal. My assumption is that you know How to make the portal very well, but running a portal is a completely different thing. There are a lots of things which are required other than having a great website. 

    1) It’s really difficult to let people know about your website. You will have to do a lot of marketing that needs money. 

    2) What will be the revenue model ? How will you monetize what you are doing ? 

  11. Now, If you are working on this – I thought I’ll put in my 2 cents. I’ve start-up called BearShop – a price analytics service that helps users buy online with NO REGRET. I do it because I love e-commerce. 

    Now, coming to your queries – 
    1- To list each and every website, do we require their permission?
    No, you do not require their permissions to plainly list sites. (Unless you are playing around with their copyright info or wrongly using their Logos or other properties). You can always contact sites and read their T&Cs. It is better to inform sites beforehand.

    2- what can be done ?
    Identify the sites you want to list, categorize them based on product categories and list them.
    You just want to list homepage, that can be done manually. If you want to list each and every product, you need to work a lot. To grab all the data, best way is to crawl/scrape the site.
    E-Bay provides APIs, and their is one unofficial for Flipkart too (only for books). Few portals Infibeam, homeshop18, indiaplaza etc. also provide timely data feeds in XML format, you can read that programmatically. 
    Indian e-com stores are not API friendly, so it is better to use a different approach.

     3- we have done no market research or anything. 
    Please do it.

    Hope this helps.

  13. Hello Deepak,

    Thanks for your feedback. We are not concerned with products and brands available on a website. We only want to give every website a equal chance to attract customers. Snapdeal was a huge success, but no look at it. From a coupon website, they have turned into a complete online shopping portal yet struggling to survive. People shifted from Snapdeal to others website only when they came to know that they exist. Hope you’re getting what i m trying to say

  14. Hello Kamal, 

    Thanks for your Feedback. I am working with two e-commerce portals, one from India and another one is from china. While i was busy doing search engine optimization for these portals, i acknowledge how your sales and traffic drops when you go off from the first page on Google. 

    1) Yes it will require a lot of money but than every single website requires marketing. No ?
    2) We will earn through Advertisements. Simple.

  15. Thanks Puneet. This post was very helpful. Here are my cents.

    1) Loved the UI of Bear Shop. Clean and sober.

    2) I am clear with what I am doing and i love it. 

    Final cent: You’re directing users to some other portals. Watching you doing that, i have a list of questions in my mind. Can we meet over a coffee? 

  16. I would prefer Beer 🙂 

  17. Cool.

    Inbox me the time and Venue. 🙂

  18. Puneet, you didn’t get the idea completely. If a user ‘wants to go to Flipkar’, he will quite obviously go to Flipkart. But this MegaMall concept says – It is a one stop place for everything that gets sold by Flipkart. So, for example – I want to buy shoes, I can go to Myntra, Yebhi, etc. For flowers, I have to go to Ferns and Petals’ website. Now if I were going to some birthday party, I have to get a gift too. I can go to Flipkart to buy books or a good gift. If at all I was planning this party myself, I had to order cake. This I will get on some known baker’s website, such as Mongini’s.

    What MegaMall concept will do is, list all these products, which are being sold by some other e-commerce website, onto their website. This way – I don’t need to ‘Search’ websites for things I need. I can simply find them here and know who’s selling what. 

    Hope you understood this now.

    Having said the above, I am not sure how well does a MegaMall concept will earn good revenues. Yes, you may be able to get some advertisement related revenues, but what next? No e-commerce website will give you commission – why should they pay you and reduce their margins? Unless there is value-add you can do for them. No e-commerce website will pay you for listing their product, otherwise why did they themselves created their listings!!

    Open to discuss this.

    M

  19. I think you should think on the lines of just dial and olx. First couple of months you can do it for free (sort of thing) make sure you tell them you are posting it. Once the websites get traffic from your site you can charge them money, they will be read to pay as well.

    I am not sure you know the story of naukari.com it started with posting the ads that appeared on newspaper for free. And then only they charged the companies.

  20. Thanks for your feedback Aparna. We are thinking the same way to do it. 

    *i was not aware of what you have written about naukri. Thanks for updating me. 😀

  21. I don’t get it. But just some observations which might help. (hopefully)

    Sometimes when you fall in love with an idea, it becomes very difficult to take a balanced approach and actually question if the idea was really that good.

    Perhaps you have heard of ” The paradox of choice”? People are looking to simplify their lives. Giving too many choices becomes overwhelming.

    I actually love Bearshop idea, for a consumer like me it simplifies things. I can see from their homepage they have more than 10K facebook likes, so I think people agree.

    What your concept is doing is burdening the people with even more data and flipping through more choices.

    Remember Yahoo, it tried to list everything from weather to movies to 100 other things on their home page. Google came on the scene with the most simplest search bar and changed the entire industry. People are looking for simplification.

    BTW, your comparison of offline Megamall to your version of Megamall is not the same. What you are trying to build is having all the dozens of Megamalls under one roof.

    Flipkart is a Megamall in itself, so is Myntra or Jabong. If people are going to buy for example a Mobile phone, they just go to flipkart or other electronice big name stores.

    To ask a consumer to first visit your site to check out products first is either a game changer or a completely insane idea.

    Trying to change consumer behavior is suicidal. The big name online commerce stores are spending Crores of rupees to gain brand recognition and stick into the consumers mind. You are not only taking on a 800 pound Gorilla but an entire group of 800 pound gorillas.

    As far as using advertising model for revenue generation, are you sure you have your numbers worked out? Are you filling in a really big pain point with a simple solution? I am not sure. With most ecommerce stores selling at almost similar price range, there is no real distinction. The game is more of marketing.

    I still don’t get it. Perhaps the proof will be in the pudding so unless you go and build, you will never know if the idea was really good or bad.

  22. Guess , there is already a concept like this ..Please check out the below website for reference 

    https://www.futurebazaar.com/

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