Junglee.com : Welcome to the Jungle

Here comes Amazon.com at last as Junglee.com, a company (domain name) that Amazon had acquired in 1998.

Junglee.com is still in its beta and offers 1.2 crore products, 90 lakhs of them are books, from over 14,000 brands and hundreds of retailers. Some of the big retailers listed on Junglee are homeShop18, UniverCell, Hidesign, Gitanjali, The Bombay Store, Fabindia, Bata India Limited, Dabur, Microsoft India Store, Reebok, Indiaplaza, bookAdda and Amazon.com.

Due to government restriction on FDI in multi-brand retail, Junglee.com is just an “Online Shopping Service” which helps user to compare price and availability from other e-retailers. You cannot buy products directly from Junglee.com. As of now IT’S NOT AN E-RETAILER and acting as a postman.

Few Observations:

• Price offered by Amazon on junglee.com is just a currency conversion from dollar to rupee. Check the snapshot given below. I searched for a book on jungle.com, 4 Indian retailers + Amazon are offering this book. Look at the price differences there. Amazon is selling that book 10 times costlier than others, also note the price offered by amazon, its 2,430 rupees and 40 paise. Where the heck does this 40 Paisa come from?

I wasn’t expecting this from Amazon. All my high hopes of Amazon India went down the drain.

• Existing Amazon users can login using their Amazon credentials. Users can then review products and even ‘Like’ products as well as sellers. "Hey Zuck, I think you should take a closer look of Amazon’s like button. Forget about raising 5 billion$ by going public, just hire a lawyer, pay him few hundred thousand dollar and get few billions from Amazon." :P
• 
  Junglee doesn’t have prices from FlipKart, myntra, infiBeam and Yebhi.
• Indian retailers can sign up for Amazon Product Ads to list their products on Junglee.com and advertise their product selection to drive targeted customer traffic to their websites and physical stores at zero cost. To get their products on to Junglee, retailers have to sign up for an account, upload their product catalog and Junglee takes care of the rest.

Do you think, Amazon is so dumb that it is helping its own competitors to grow their businesses?

Here is the master plan: By providing a common platform to consumers and retailers, Amazon knows what a customer wants and what are the prices offered by other Indian retailers (competitors) in real time. So it’s simple, Amazon will be selling products cheaper than what other Indian retailers are offering. Eventually, this will kill the competition.

Amit Agarwal (the author of leading tech blog labnol.org) has developed a bookmarklet that lets you compare prices of books on Junglee.com with that of Flipkart and Infibeam in one go.

Check this out “Is Junglee Cheaper than Flipkart or Infibeam?”

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