BENGALURU: Taking a cue from e-commerce majors like Flipkart and Snapdeal, lesser known online players have now started to collaborate with affiliate websites to keep their cash registers ringing.
Smaller players SyberPlace.com and Smartprice.com claim to have begun to see a surge in their sales merely by collaborating with affiliate websites. These e-commerce companies and web-stores are seeing a high growth and revenues on their platforms due to tie-ups with the couponing websites like grabon.in and coupondunia.in.
Couponing websites push traffic to the smaller e-commerce players’ sites, which helps them gain visibility in the e-commerce space. Additionally, coupons and discounts offered by smaller players bring down the products’ cost to a large extent, making online shopping far cheaper when compared to purchased from brick and mortar establishments.
SyberPlace, a webstore selling digital products like smartphones, laptops, tablets and accessories, found it hard in its initial days to reach the target consumers and to raise revenues. However, with its multiple deep discounting coupons and cashback offers, SyberPlace has managed to turn the corner and today it boasts of being highly cash positive.
Smartprix, an emerging e-com company that provides the ease and convenience of comparing prices of consumer electronics, to shoppers, also offers attractive deals, discount coupons and cashbacks to consumers.
Urvesh Goel, founder and CEO, SyberPlace, told Express, “It helps to attract customers and helps convert bigger numbers of people into customers.”
But, there’s a word of caution about companies overusing/misusing the concept to push their products.
Abhinav Choudhary, Smartprix.com, believes, “If this is overdone, and if there is marking-up (inflating prices and giving a discount on that) of pricing before the discount is offered, then people could lose interest.”