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The number of internet users in India has grown from 5,000,000 in 2000 to 81,000,000 in 2009 showcasing a phenomenal growth of 1520% over last 10 years. However, internet penetration levels still remain very low. It stands at 7% compared to 32% in China, 78% in Japan and 77% in USA. With India's growing younger population and recent surge in Online shopping, it is a matter of time that the penetration will cross double digits. However, even 3% increase means a LOT many new internet users (close to 35 million). That’s HUGE!
All these users will turn to reliable websites for Information. And Indian websites severely lack information and original content. Indian users thus lose out to US and European counterparts.
Let us take example of Online Shopping in India. We have seen some of the big players actually entered Ecommerce market in India and this looks like an emerging opportunity for every player. Based on the global pattern in this field, we have seen two kinds of players, one is Product Selling Site and other is Informative Site. As per Alexa, a reputed web information company, websites like GSMArena and CNET get 35% and 21% traffic respectively from India. Amazon gets 4% traffic from India alone. It's food for thought - why would Indian users frequent US Online Shopping websites? They are looking for Information, product reviews, best deals. They have dispensable income but they are deprived of "totally indian" reliable community for their online shopping need, to save them money and time. They are lacking a community where they could rant about inefficiency of some shopping vendors and discuss pros and cons of products they are looking to purchase.
Ecommerce in Countries like USA have matured and is several miles ahead of Ecommerce in India, which is still in its nascent stages. But with big players entering the Ecommerce market, Indian users have seen a recent trend of daily deal websites opening new shops every months and healthy competition means better bargains for Indian users and secret coupon codes.
Looking at this trend, few guys from India came up with this idea of launching desidime.com, an online shopping community to find best deals, coupons, freebies and product reviews for "Aam Janta".
desidime.com is community which is created by the users, for the users, to share the best deals, be it daily deals, special promotions, freebies, coupons and product reviews. The site features the "top deals" on home page that gets selected by the community by voting it as "Happy deal". They also have "Deal Baba" which finds a deal for you and does all the research for you. To make it exciting for users they frequently organize contests and lucky draws
And yes, they even reward deal hunters in their own currency "Desi Dimes" which one can redeem for exciting gifts like gift vouchers, iPod, PS3 etc. They pay you 50 dimes (equivalent to Rs. 50) for simply filling up a registration form.
They are also planning to add more value added features, like store reviews, personal chat, reputation system and many more, to avoid being categorized as 'just-another-shopping-website'. Their main focus is to be a user focused community to help Indian Online Shoppers to save money, time and make the best shopping decisions.
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