Author Archives: Amit

MoneySaver… India’s most comprehensive shopping coupons delivery system

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MoneySaver is aiming to be India’s most comprehensive deal/discount destination. It helps you save money on everyday errands- eating out, shopping, travel, buying cinema tickets et al. MoneySaver’s key advantage is its coupon database, which it claims is the country’s largest database of offers from top brands and premium restaurants. Based out of Delhi, Moneysaver is cofounded by Kunal Bahl, a former Microsoft employee. It is presently on offer only in Delhi/NCR but plans a nationwide expansion soon.

So how does it work? At the heart of the system is the MoneySaver booklet which you need to buy for Rs 399/-. This contains paper coupons & mobile coupons, which can be redeemed at the merchant establishments (for the mobile coupons, you need to register you mobile number first using a scratch card that comes with the booklet). You can buy the Moneysaver booklet online, or from affiliate stores. The booklet has a validity of 6 months and contains discounts for a cumulative sum of Rs 30,000/- (WOW! thats a whole lot)

The company is targeting not just end consumers, but corporates & institutions as well. Institutions (e.g. schools) can use MoneySaver as a fundraising tool by retaining a portion of the sale proceeds. Large corporations can have customized MoneySaver books/discount programs into their sales, marketing and employee benefit programs. More details here and here.

Shopping is usually a highly localised activity. And deals/discounts make most sense if they are available at outlets that the consumer typically visits (there is lesser likelihood of the discount being availed if it is for a completely new shop). I checked out the deals on MoneySaver for Delhi and it covers many shops/showrooms that I visit regularly. So thats a definite plus!

There is off course no dearth of shopping discount booklets/coupons on offer, but their distribution and administration is fragmented. Often they are delivered through local vendors, newspaper hawkers etc. There are a handful of websites that aggregate shopping deals as well, but I doubt if they have significant traction. MoneySaver therefore has certain advantages that are hard to miss – it is planning a national footprint, it has its own website for distributing the coupon booklet, and it has a direct interface with merchant establishments for the deals, instead of relying on a third party or aggregating it from elsewhere.

MeraSnap acquired by Hewlett Packard’s Snapfish…

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mera1.jpgMeraSnap, the online photo printing & delivery service has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Snapfish, the Indian arm of the global printing service from Hewlett Packard. As per this report in ContentSutra, the raison d’etre for the acquisition is the 100K users that MeraSnap has acquired over the last couple of years. MeraSnap was profiled on Webyantra in Sep2006. Its founders are the promoters of Knowledgeworkz, a Bangalore based information management consulting company. Congrats to them for pulling through this deal.

Snapfish has 200K users (as the report indicates), so that’s a straight 50% jump in the customer base for the company. That’s bang for the buck straightaway (notwithstanding how you define the users- accounts, active users, paying users, repeat users et al) In fact this is a customer acquisition and not a company acquisition, hence the MeraSnap team is not joining SnapFish. Interestingly enough the ContentSutra article seems to suggest that Snapfish had sniffed around other Indian players in this segment as well, and felt that Merasnap’s user base was larger than that of the other players (iTasveer, eYaadein, 123shots, Picsquare, RangeelaPhotos etc) in terms of repeat usage.

M&A activity in the Indian Web2.0 space has been few and far between. The other cases that come to mind are Bixee’s acquisition by IBIBO & Desimartini’s acquisition by HT Media. None of these examples are posters for Web2.0 M&A activity in terms of the size of the deal or its overall influence. The latter in fact was the subject of intense joking speculation as to the underlying motive. However one can’t question the logic behind these acquisitions from the viewpoint of the acquirers. I am sure they best know their business and are fully in control of what they are doing. The reasons may differ from case to case- sometimes the entire company may be getting acquired lock, stock & barrel; sometimes the real reason for the acquisition may be getting hold of the technology or just the user/customer base; at other times acquiring key personnel may be the biggest takeaway for the acquirer.