With ValueTag, Compare Prices Online While Shopping Offline
Enjoy price comparison for the time it saves, but dislike having to visit the website associated with it each time? Then a startup based out of USA has just the thing for you. ValueTag, developed by an IIT graduate, a former Apple employee and a former ICICI bank employee is a new entrant in the price comparison space.
It seeks to tap into the growing popularity of comparison shopping in India. Comparison shopping sites grew in popularity by 52% by March 2013, compared to the previous year, according to comScore.
ValueTag lets users compare prices on any website using its plug-in, and also lets users discover the best price while they shop offline. The platform has been developed by startup CopperPix and has two primary features apart from the website usually used for price comparison.
The ValueTag Price Comparison Extension
The plug-in that is available for the Chrome, Firefox and Safari web browsers lets users compare products on almost any website they visit. Once the plug-in is installed, users can visit any product website, and compare prices by hovering over the product image and clicking on the 'Best Price' icon.
The company claims that the extension will work for over 65 e-commerce portals across India and the USA.
"The plug-in was released just a week back, but it already has more than 1,200 Facebook likes, and 100s of extension downloads. We are expecting a much larger turnout for the mobile app considering that the browser add-on awareness is low in India," says Nitin Mittal, co-founder at CopperPix.
The Chrome extension of the app, currently has 69 users.
Price comparison website BuyHatke already has a Chrome extension, which it had released in September 2013. BuyHatke also added a new feature to the extension that allows users to set price alerts. Makkichoose is another such plug-in.
The ValueTag App
The company also has an interesting app which allows users to compare prices of offline products with their online counterparts. The app has a product search option akin to the one on the website, as well as a barcode scanner.
"Our mobile app provides a barcode scanner for in-store shoppers. The barcode is used in stores to scan product prices. The integrated barcode scanner provides the best deals and coupons on that product in different stores," says Nitin.
The scanner also compares the price of the product with the prices available for it with e-commerce portals. The app is currently available in public beta on the PlayStore and can be downloaded from here.
We tried the app. It doesn't seem to be working too well. We tried it on different products, and the results it showed were not in the same product category. It showed up price comparisons for Zippo Lighters only, while we scanned products ranging from a packet of milk, a bag of chips, to a hair dryer and a toaster.
The company has invested Rs 25 lakh into product development and currently has over a 100 store partners on board their platform.
Price comparison website Shoppingwish had also launched a barcode scanner 'Scandid', to compare prices of products while shopping offline.