Am I Really Not Fooled? Indian Online Shopping Jargons - Deal of the Daaaay, Lightning Deeeals, Only App Deals, More Savings, Blah Blah Blah....

As an avid reader, I'm also an online-shopping freak, that too when there is some offer period from e-shopping sites, my browser tab's count goes beyond 40! (just to make sure I'm not being fooled :)

But am I really not fooled?? WHO KNOWS?

Well, I tried knowing it..

Price comparison sites like MySmartPrice, BuyHatke, IndiaBookStore (majorly for books) helps to an extent to know whether the current Customer Owe Price* (COP) that I owe (note: it is not "pay") is really the lowest price online.

*COP is just what is being owed to online seller, but more often actual payment are not the same, thanks to Credit/Debit/Net Banking Cash backs, bundle discounts, shipping charge wave-off, Coupon Discounts, Referral Discounts, Loyalty discount points redemption (like PayBack), etc.. etc..

Sites like MySmartPrice, BuyHatke were started merely as add-in tool to web browsers to help shoppers to compare price (COP) of the same product at various sites. Technically speaking what they do is crawl the lowest price of the product from multiple e-commerce sites and displays to the shopper to make choices, even with historic price graphs!. Now, even these sites who claims that they help shoppers to make the best purchase decision, fail sometimes. After all, these sites are also here for commercial purpose hence they too tend to promote products, indirectly if not directly.

Deal of the Daaaay, Lightning Deeeals, Only App Deals, More Savings, Blah Blah Blah....

Above jargons are quite familiar to most of the e-shoppers today, but only handful of us actually know what exactly determines a product to go into which type of Deal, in other words, what is the difference among these deals?.

Here are my understanding on these deals from my shopping experience (mostly on Amazon.in)...

Deal of the Day : Popularly known as DOTDs in ecommerce industry, are those products which gets the prime RE ('real estate', yet another jargon) on the e-commerce website, usually that have more (or piled up) stock with the seller and he is ready to sell @ deep discounted price - how deep? well, that depends on seller's capacity to take "loss"! Yes, most of the times DOTDs are meant to sell-off large amount of stock in less than 24 hrs. Just by having prime RE space can't this product be sold @ little margin/atleast break even price?? NO, to get the prime DOTD spot all of the e-commerce market places have the qualifiers, which a product has to satisfy.

Few of the qualifiers are*

- the product should not have reviews less than 3Stars..

- the product was available on the site since 30 days or more..

- the DOTD price (remember 'COP') should be atleast 10-15% lower than the next offer price on the same market place..

- the DOTD price should also be competitive with the other marketplace prices.

with all the above qualifiers in place, seller gets hardly any chance to make margin/breakeven.

*note all the above would vary across market places, product categories, marketing funding been paid by brand/seller to market places and even preferred/non-preferred seller to market places.

Lightning Deals : These are the deals mostly on Amazon.in which are for short-time, usually 4-8 hrs. These deals usually has 5-10% less COP comparing to the other offers on the same product. I like the functioning of this deal, as asks for customer to make the buy-decision quickly.

When you actually choose a product and "Add to Cart" you've only 15 mins to check-out or till Lightning Deal lapse time whichever occurs earlier. You get notification too when you near that time.

Note: any of the deal products can be bought only 1 unit at a time in an order.

There is even more buyer persuading technique that goes with this sort of deals, which is '%Claimed' & 'Ends in hh:mm:ss'. '%claimed' is a simple ratio of the number of units of the deal product been added to the cart at the time of view to the total number of stock available for the product @ this deal price by this seller, keeping the technicality aside, this simply persuades by saying 'dude, people are buying this product @ this(%) pace, why don't you try too?'. Any unclaimed units (remember 15 mins to checkout?) will get added back to the deal and that's why sometimes you see the %claimed fluctuating on both higher and lower sides.'Ends in hh:mm:ss' is simply the lapse/countdown meter that says how long the deal is available, meaning the product from this seller @ this deal price.

Well, what happens if the '%claimed' is 100%?? No need to worry, Amazon provides an option to add the product to 'Deal Waitlist' which is the sort of hope the customer might get the chance to buy the product if any of the previous additions to cart/orders gets reversed/cancelled.

Sometimes you might see 'waitlist is full' which means (you are too late, better-luck-next-time!) no more chance of buying this product from this seller at this deal price now.

App Only Deals : All ecommerce players face the challenge of conversion (a technical term used to simply mean "can a window shopper be converted to purchases?"). Hence almost every ecommerce site has their respective app (few of the new ones have only App not a website at all!) where the probability of converting a window shopper (an 'app surfer') to a purchaser, how? well, the ease of access is sole reason. With number of smartphone users going up, customer tend to become more smarter in the way they shop..

I don't agree with this, even now I'm more happy in making an order of my next book/gadget only after thorough research, which is quite not easy to carry out on mobile app. In fact I do research on my laptop & purchase on mobile just to get the deal price which is available on mobile app ONLY:)

Even though few apps allows us to compare the prices & do research direct from mobile app like Flipkart's 'Ping your friend' (which is an imitation of Facebook messenger's bubble), I still feel the satisfaction of doing research on a typical website on a laptop/computer is much better... 

More Savings : comprises mostly of "Exclusive" products, (remember Moto E, G launch on Flipkart? such products) or consists of products which are priced not more than 5% discount (depending on product category). By definition, these products cannot go under DOTD or Lightning deal @ this price.

I'm still wondering if I'm not been fooled on my purchase.. If you are also on the same side, one suggestion for you.. 'Please do not check the product's price after you purchased!, even if you want to, plz do it before the return period (like 10 days/30 days) so that you can claim the difference or return the product under Buyer-Protection & buy @ new best price'... if you have any more suggestion plz leave me a comment..