CrawlFish, A Price Aggregator with a Location Based Search Engine
Chennai based bootstrap venture “CrawlFish” is an online price comparison website brought to you by Transinfinity Technologies which enables the customer to find, explore, compare prices of products and discover the best deals online. Add retailers in cities across India and a system that assists customers in making a well-informed purchase decision and you have a winner of an idea.
Started by three friends, the company offers price listings from both online and offline sellers. Founded by Senthil Kumar M, Karthikeyan Sakthivel and Vijayaragavan Venkatarathinam, CrawlFish is a price aggregator and can be used as a location based price search engine, where people can find the price of a product from a shop near their place in their locality. They have placed their bets on an online-offline hybrid model explaining that Ecommerce in India is still nascent because Ecommerce directly depends upon internet penetration. Also they add “A lot of people still buy from offline shops.”
Initially the site is using Chennai as their testing grounds and offer a wide spectrum of offline offers which would have gone unnoticed because they lack an online presence. They also spoke to many offline shop owners about how they compared to online stores. They managed to convince them that things like COD, special deliveries and product handling policies are here to stay. This move they believe will eventually bring both mediums on a level playing field. One can check out price comparisons in a locality specific search on the site and though they are limited to Chennai at the moment going nationwide is their dream and challenge.Vijay describes his vision saying “We want to make a one stop shop.”
Their revenue mainly comes from two sources. The online shops have a commission based model dependent on the number of sales that the site sends their way. There is also a CRM model available which allows them to maintain product catalogues, add, edit or update descriptions and products etc. Crawlfish also has a value add in the form of a monthly analysis of how vendors are doing on their site. The analytics that they offer will give out a lot of information on buyer trends, user experiences and other data that will help them to make their business better. At the moment the three founders are running the business on their own. They are on the lookout for talent and will be hiring but confess that “finding the right person is difficult”.
Crawlfish is on YourStory PAGES.