Local Search and Yellow Pages Giant, Just Dial has recently enabled online shopping on its platform and is currently mainly selling electronics in Tier 1/2 cities. It has already enabled a number of services (restaurant delivery & reservations, doctor’s appointment, cab booking, hotels, ticketing, movie booking, mobile recharge), on the product side it has only enabled sales of electronic items. The delivery is done by the seller itself and not by Just Dial, one can buy items only from sellers in the same city. There is reasonable breadth of products and depth of sellers only in top metros of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore though the platform is enabled for 15 cities across India.
We compared the prices of different items across Just Dial and the 3 major e-tailing sites in India. At least in Mumbai and Delhi, we found prices on Just Dial to be fairly competitive as shown below.
We also found a fairly high correlation between pricing and number of sellers with Just Dial having maximum sellers on 20 occasions against 27 for Snapdeal, 14 for Amazon and 4 for Flipkart. Given that Just Dial has different vendors in each city, this indicates that Just Dial seems to have tapped into a much larger vendor base in a fairly short period of time.
Vendor Fulfillment A Big Challenge
Quality of fulfillment by the vendor appears to be a key challenge though. Some vendors unwilling to deliver to far-off areas within the same city even though no such restriction was mentioned on the site. Also some were asking for an additional delivery charge over and above the quoted price even though this was not mentioned on the site. With larger scale, frequent human intervention to address the issue of quality of vendors would be difficult in our view and is a problem that needs to be addressed.
UI / UX need to be Improved
Just Dial’s homepage (both desktop and mobile app) gives “Shop Online” as one of many options – given Just Dial’s many service offerings it will need to figure out a way to promote online shopping better on its homepage. In subsequent ends up with a list of vendors rather than a list of best prices – again a prioritization issue between its legacy search business and online shopping. The Number of Steps before you place an order is too high compared to other retailers and JustDial really needs to optimize the whole shopping experience, in our view.