Price comparison service PriceBaba has introduced a new feature called PriceBaba Local, which will offer consumers pricing and availability status of mobile phones from local stores around them. The service is currently available in Mumbai.
At the time of writing this article, we noticed that it offers local pricing for mobile phones in select stores in Mumbai, although other stores might be in the works. It will be interesting to see where this feature goes from here. We feel some of the obvious future additions will be the ability to sort these stores based on distance from a specific locality and also probably filter these stores to a specific distance limit.
This will also possibly pave the way for PriceBaba to offer an in-store pickup service in the future, wherein consumers can book phones online and pick them up from a nearby store on the same day, rather than purchasing them on an e-commerce store and waiting for the phone to arrive after a couple of days to a week.
An in-store pickup service will also the address the problem of people who intend to purchase a phone after looking after various options online, but don’t have a credit card or are wary of sharing their credit card details online. Although, it might also lead to instances of people booking the phone and not turning up to pay and collect the phone.
Spice Group’s* online retail store Saholic had introduced a similar service in August 2012, but it was limited to only Spice Hotspot retail outlets. In comparison, PriceBaba lists various third party local retailers and claims to have over 700 retailers across India.
PriceBaba Expands To Bangalore: Coinciding with this feature launch, PriceBaba has also expanded its services to Bangalore. The company claims to have listed over 200 verified mobile phone retailers from Bangalore on its platform.
It is currently operational in six Indian cities including Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Pune and Mumbai and hopes to reach 10 cities by the end of this year. PriceBaba also claims these retailers have undergone a two step verification process.
The company had earlier raised seed investment from five investors and was also part of 500 Startups spring 2013 batch. It had also partnered with 55444 (Innoz Technologies) to allow users check mobile prices in their vicinity via SMS.
While there are a plethora of price comparison sites like MySmartPrice, CompareIndia, FindYogi, Buyt.in, CompareRaja, PriceDekho, BearShop, ShoppingWish.in, BuyingIQ and a new price comparison site popping up every week in the country, its worth noting that PriceBaba differs from these sites by taking the offline approach i.e. providing price comparison for mobile handsets from offline retailers.
*Note: Disclosures apply
