All the e-commerce players are trying to create an atmosphere of “sale” during the festive season and get customers to buy stuff that they don’t want. The three big players Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal have been following a very similar strategy and there isn’t any difference between their showcasing of deals.

I have not seen other newspapers but Times Of India Bangalore edition of 2nd October had probably six pages of full page advertisement of Snapdeal, Flipkart and Amazon before actual newspaper started. I think they were in the same order. Looks like this had become a minimum benchmark for  e-commerce players to feature full page advertising on leading dailies. As per Quora post  a full page advertisement can cost INR 1.5 Crore (15 million) for a an edition that has lot of readership in a metropolitan area. So in any way this is nowhere cheap and when all are doing the it makes all the more difficult to really stand out.

Also if you have been monitoring the price, many of the 70% off are actually on the hiked price before the sales which is an old technique used by brick and mortar shops for long. I have bought stuffs from Amazon and Flipkart and don’t think have actually got any better deal as to normal off deal time.

To me it looks like half hearted attempt just to create buzz around the market and get people who have not been doing online shopping much.

I feel there is definitely a scope for a product that helps in price discovery (buyhatke is one which has been trying to do something on this)on the online sellers like these tracking historical prices and helping customers to actually make a judgement as to what is actually a deal and what is actually a farce.

I also imagine if offline price discovery can be brought into it will be great for the customers as many times I am seeing these days the deal turns out be much better the the online retailers.

Unless there is a earnest desire of these e-commerce companies to rise above these stale branding campaigns where they are spending lot of money and the actual customers are in no way getting a better deal.

Hopefully we will have some better product for price discovery  so that the e-commerce players will consider Indian market more mature and we will get really good deals 🙂