The current trend in India is e-commerce websites. MySmartPrice (a price comparison site for Indian e-commerce sites) compiled a list of 343 websites (as of May 2012). There are more than 813 seller listings on Junglee.com. There are so many that are not listed
I found 24 websites(as of April 2013) which do the aggregation of prices from pretty old to the latest Indian e-commerce websites. I found all these through a quick 15 minute search. Well, Junglee is the most famous because its made by Amazon. A base for attracting customers towards amazon.in probably.
From my personal experiences of searching for books and buying in the last 2 months of around 10k spent in total.
Flipkart has a great service, Literally a 2-day delivery to Hyderabad. Though an incorrect pincode might lead it to a different city which you should ensure before clicking on ‘Order’.
SnapDeal spends a great fortune to speed up the site to everyone. Their customer service is a nightmare when you email them. They get back to you only after few days and they prefer to talk to you over phone for things that can be done on email. Adobe and Akamai services for their websites.
Infibeam still offers free shipping for any price and had a headstart on getting up 3rd party sellers.You cannot move an item from the cart to a wishlist.
BookAdda has a lot of books in stock which I needed (OReilly books and Pearson) for a fairly lower price tag and in availability. I had many bad experiences with the website like losing the items in the cart.
BuyThePrice was shutdown about a month ago.
Shroff Publishers displays the wishlist (w/o truncating it) and items in cart on each and every page. The shipping costs you about 30% more to the value of items in your cart. They use DTDC ( the not-so great courier company which takes 2 days to deliver a package that is < 1km away from the target). You can create a wishlist even though you are not logged in. ( No other site Indian e-commerce does that currently)
The big sites (Flipkart, Infibeam etc) have their own e-commerce setup, the smaller ones use existing solutions which not so great options for tracking the package or estimates.
The checkout process of Flipkart is a great one. Flipkart has its own Payment Gateway which helps it with the customer experience. PayTM is something that is worth mentioning in terms of UI and the payment gateway experience. You can pay with ease less the frustration brought to you with CC Avenue/HDFC Payment Gateways. I remember selecting the country from a big list. At the least, It could save the billing address from the history or cookies or even look up based on IP to set the country appropriately. I remember the pain of typing my address and multiple forms for each and every payment I make when I renew my domains.
There are also quite a few payment gateways being created. There are websites being created like Stripe in India. juspay has a highly identical user experience and APIs 🙂 Indian websites – if you want to know how not to do and the most frustrating side for customers – choose CCAvenue, if not, choose something like Flipkart/PayTM does.
The toughest thing to solve in a PG is Fraud Detection. I am not sure if PGs in India have to deal with fraud. I have an e-mail from CCAvenue(through a merchant) that it does not pay the merchant if the bank does not release the amount. Paypal used to run in huge losses because of bad/no fraud handling. Amazon does ship the item to the customer only after it goes through an initial Fraud Check).
Sairam's Blog 