All the brands are busy promoting offers and promo codes but do you really know whether the offer is actually saving you money or just a trap to attract your attention when you buy online? We all buy products online, especially when we see sale but do we really compare the price? Do we really check the product review? Well, checkout my experience I had few years back.
While I was searching offers and deals on different online seller in India, I just came across this deals page. I was amazed to see attractive offers and deals on different categories of products which can easily convince you to buy that product online from this seller.
Here is the screenshot of their deals page:
Entitled with “mega gadget sale” that start from 7% to 75% discount (this is what I manually found on different products). Then I thought to compare the price of these products with other online sellers like Amazon.in. I was surprised to see that the price and the way this seller is making us fool by displaying huge discount.
Let me explain in details
I took a product named “D-Link DIR-600L Wireless N 150” which is under huge discount on this seller’s store. See below image which clearly depict that the old price of this router is Rs 2730 and now available at just Rs 1221 (at 55% discount)! At first glance it looks attractive right? But I thought to check the price on Amazon.in
Then I open Amazon.in and search for the same product. You must be surprised to see that the same product was available at just Rs 1295.30 previously and now after discount, it is available at just Rs 1049
Due to festival, most of the eCommerce website starts promoting their product with various deals and offer. But the way this seller is promoting is really surprising for me. Most of the buyers see the % of discount and hardly compare the price on different website and get fooled by seller.
I have been working with big eCommerce vendor since long and I know many vendors are practice such techniques to acquire customers but I never expected this from such a big brand. Based on my experience, I strongly recommend following below steps before you make your online purchase decision:
- Once you finalized the product, go to different vendor selling same products online.
- See the price and shipping options (it may happen that the price of paid shipping vendor is lower than price of on offering FREE shipping). You should check the price of product after including shipping cost.
- You should also check for different offers like (CC discount, coupon code etc) and evaluate the final cost of the product on each seller including discount.
- Once you found cheapest seller, read review of their services as cheapest is not always the best. Also check for their return policy and shipping method. I would prefer paying more when I buy from Amazon as compare to unknown seller.
I am sure this will help you to make wise decision when you buy your favorite product on holiday season.
Have you ever seen such offers like this? Do share your experience with our readers in comments.
Fantastic post JG, I like the way you research but the problem is not many users go and search this much. Most people who buy online are youths who do not like price shopping (Atleast in India) and hence no price comparison website is every as popular as the main ecommerce websites. It neither is popular in western countries but still people do use such website but if you talk about hotels/flights search engine, I’ve personally seen users looking at kayak and other engines to find the best rates 🙂
Thank you very much Krunal for your feedback on my given article. I do agree with your point on comparison shopping. What i found is; people do not trust comparison engine as they think that the price may be differ from original website and comparison engine 🙂
eCommerce market is in initial stage in India and it will take time for both consumer and seller to understand ecosystem.
I too agree with your opinion….
Thank you Pratik for you feedback..