Haggle away for everything with LootStreet
Indian consumers are one of the biggest bargain hunters in the world. For all ye bargain hunters, there’s good news. LootStreet is a new startup that’ll hopefully satiate some of your appetite for haggling. Founded by two IIMA grads, LootStreet offers a marketplace for buyers and sellers to come together.
Unlike eBay, LootStreet is not an auction service. Instead, sellers list the product they’d like to sell and for what price. Buyers can then ‘haggle’ for a lower price with the seller. If both parties agree, a deal is struck. Else, the bargaining continues. Every quote that the buyer makes must be higher than their previous attempts. Currently, they dont charge for listing your products except for the 4% transaction fees charged by payment gateways. As traffic grows, they’ll take a percentage cut for listing the product.
While the biz model makes sense, the biggest challenge they’d face is from eBay. eBay is an established brand and most of the folks have gotten familiar with eBay’s auction model. Attracting seller inventory will be a challenge, but it seems that they have already signed up partners like GizmoBazaar, Gadgets.in, gadgetsguru.com etc.
One of the biggest plus for the startup is that they’ve managed to rope in Deep Kalra, MakeMyTrip CEO, as their mentor. That should not only bring in some savvy business acumen, but some great business contacts as well.
It will be good to revisit LootStreet in 6months time and see how well they’re faring.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:57 am
I heard of this one during the Eureka at IIT Mumbai this year. One of my seniors (and Entrepreneur) was talking about this idea. This is what he called reverse of Ebay (i.e. here the buyers have an advantage over the sellers, rather than sellers having it in Ebay)!