Indian Startup Review: CouponDunia

CouponDunia fills an important gap in India’s online retail market – coupons.  I had often wondered what could be the alternative for coupon sites like FatWallet and PromoCodeWatch where in India.  Well, CouponDunia is not quite Fatwallet in that it is not a crowdsourced discount sharing site – which can be very realtime and diverse – but it is more structured discount coupon site which has listings of the top online retail stores in India.

For those who were looking for a Groupon clone – this is not it.

CouponDunia is India’s largest discount coupons and offers site with over 750 merchants listed.  As the internet connectivity increases and the online population becomes more empowered by newer retail offerings, CouponDunia becomes useful.  Check out the following merchants: Flipkart . Yebhi . Tradus

The only issue I see with CouponDunia is that its model is easy to copy and replicate.  For example, Cuponation.

However, CouponDunia has the first mover advantage and it would be important for it to keep increasing its offerings and ways to engage the consumer.

Improvement Opportunities

Categorization:

One of the things that I would surely like to see is creating Menu for different categories and having the retailers under those categories like – Electronics, Food, Apparel etc.  Even if some of the retailers may be in multiple categories, the coupons for specific categories can be listen under the relevant menu category.

Search Capability:

for such sites it is critical to have great search capabilities.  Unless people can zero in on the exact thing they want, they will lose out interest in it.

Crowdsourcing:

In the US, people share fantastic deals and such a model should be encouraged in India as well.  With so many people, if such a model starts, it can be a great hit and very useful!