Online marketplace Amazon India is looking at ways to capitalise on its comparison site Junglee.com's growth. Besides introducing new features on the site, it is looking at launching a mobile application and revamping the website to create a single place for both sellers and consumers to search, compare and review products.
The ecommerce giant, that entered the market place with acquisition of Junglee.com in 2011, is also contemplating ways to monetise the comparison site soon. Currently, Junglee does not charge its sellers either for listings or for the traffic that referred to them. However, the company did not give any specific timeline as when it would start generating revenues instead the focus is to grow the seller base.
Junglee also does not provide any added advantage to Amazon as it is a neutral and unbiased platform that treats and shares the same data with Amazon as it does with other sellers.
Mahendra Nerurkar, General Manager, Junglee.com said, “We want to focus on this space to build a compelling seller and customer experience and that can open up a lot of opportunities for long term free cash flows. Once we build a high traffic site, which both consumers and sellers value, there are quite a few revenue models that we can explore.” He further added that the focus is to help customers make their purchases across online and offline within and outside India.
The product search and price comparison site, which has been rated as the top such site by comScore for five consecutive quarters, has over 30 million products across 25 categories and offers search and comparison across 1,700 websites and 60,000 offline sellers. Its page views have grown 300 per cent year-on-year, according to comScore, an American internet analytics firm.
Ecommerce growthNerurkar said the faster growth of ecommerce in India can be attributed to the increase in use of smartphones, and hence, it is important to have a mobile application and that the company will be launching one soon.
According to a recent report by InMobi, mobile commerce will grow by 15 per cent in 2014, with 83 per cent of respondents planning to conduct mobile commerce in the next 12 months. The site has launched features to locate stores and also to search for used products through tie-up with Quikr.com.