Click to snap deals

Every shopper dreams of getting the best discount. Now, imagine if you can avail of this discount at the click of your mouse.

Snapdeal, started by Jasper Marketing Solutions' head Kunal Bahl (28), does precisely this. The portal offers daily deals with discounts at leading restaurants, spas, dance classes, weekend getaways, and even tattoo parlours.

"We wanted to bring buyers and sellers together in a collaborated way," says Bahl, who is a graduate from the Wharton School of Business and has worked with Microsoft earlier. The discounts that Snapdeal provides are in the range of 50-80 per cent.

What Snapdeal does is offer customers cost-effective deals and retailers a whole set of new customers. Snapdeal was launched last month and has already received over 90,000 hits. All this without any marketing initiative.

Bahl is confident that the word-of-mouth publicity will help attract more people to the portal. To keep the audiences updated on deals, Snapdeal initiated a Facebook community and, within a month, attracted over 11,000 fans.

Payments are made through credit cards on www.snapdeal.com and once the payment is received, the consumer gets an SMS and an email with a link to easily print his SnapDeal voucher. The same can be redeemed at the mentioned outlet/s within the validity period.

Presently, the portal offers its services in three cities – Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore – and has over 200 retailers under its fold. Bahl says expansion plans are on the anvil and the company is eyeing 25 cities by the end of the year. Snapdeal charges a marketing fee from the retailer for every deal sold on the portal.

The site, however, is focussed on getting deals from the smaller and fragmented retail players. Bahl says that most of the retail sector is unorganised and about $350-billion revenues from the retail sector come from small and medium enterprises.

"These people can't afford to spend on marketing and promotional activities," he says. And that's where he and Snapdeal come into the picture. So far, the response from retailers has been encouraging. In fact, Snapdeal has also tied up with Fever 104 to offer some deals related to the IPL team, Delhi Daredevils.

The next step, according to Bahl, is an investment of Rs 8-10 crore for the portal's expansion and its promotion.