Online shopping is un-beatable at one aspect, its convinient! You dont have to go anywhere, and can buy the stuff you want sitting at your home with just a few clicks. Then why is that online shopping has not really kicked off in India yet? There are many reasons people prefer offline (conventional/traditional) shopping over online shopping. Two of the prime reasons according to me are,
- Issue of giving your bank details/ credit card information on the internet: This issue can be addressed if you do your transactions on a secured server and make sure you are not entering your details on a phishing website.
- Other is, you can go out with your friends/ loved ones for shopping, take their opinions, talk to them making the experience overall memorable and fun which is so not the case with online shopping where you just shop sitting alone in front of your computer and you cant talk to your friends and cant take their opinions/ reviews about the product you want to buy.
Shopcorn is a wonderful new portal which changes just that. Shopcorn is India’s first online social shopping destination. You can chat to your friends over text, voice or video, share their views and reviews about a product, pick great deals and kick bad deals. Not only that, you can read/ write product reviews and blogs, watch videos of products uploaded by the community members or upload a video of your own. You can also ask questions about your product and also help fellow shoppers if they want help in something they are buying in Q&A. (this is a social shopping portal after all, the more you participate, the better it becomes, and more fun it is).
This all makes shopping interactive and a fun experience, just like normal/offline shopping.
Have a look at this presentation to get what I am talking about:
The best part of Shopcorn is that it lists the BEST deals from different shopping websites like Rediff.com, Indiatimes.com, Shoppersstop.com under the user generated section “Deals Box“. You can be sure that the deals are one of the best as users “pick” only the good deals and “kick” the bad deals. More the similar deals, more are the deal challenges and eventually, you, the buyer is the winner of the competition between the sellers. If you have more challenges for product, you can do comparison shopping and pick only the best deals for yourself.
And since this is a “social” portal, you can also maintain your own profile wherein you can tell people more about yourself, write and recieve messages (scraps) from people, add friends and favorite deals etc.
All these great features make Shopcorn a perfect destination for community shopping.
There is one last thing though which can make you dicth online shopping. A slow to death internet connection. If you are a “victim” of slow internet connection then you will love this. Tata Indicom have introduced Photon+, an amazingly fast wireless broadband internet service, which gives blazingly fast speeds of 3.1 mbps (downlink), 20 times faster than any wireless technology taht we have right now in India. And as it comes on a USB device, you can carry it with you with ease. You can just plug the USB modem into your pc and you are good to experience a never before internet ride. This will for sure to make your shopping experience at Shopcorn a smooth ride.
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
What you said is true. Hesitation to disclose credit card details and the love to go shopping are the two reasons, Indians don’t prefer online shopping. But shopcorn seems to be really good. I had not heard about it till I read your article. Will surely give it a try.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
Hi Mayank,
Nice post and I am pretty sure shopcorn will quickly grow as online sales increase in India. And as thinks look at the moment it won’t take too long.
October 28th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
garden sheds are really great specially during the summer, they provide adequate shade and a place to cool down~’-