“Contrary to the popular notion that online prices for smartphones are lower than offline stores, the truth is that physical stores match or sometimes even offer better pricing”
India is riding on the e-commerce wave, both with respect to shopaholics bitten by the online shopping bug, as well as the number of players fighting in the market. With most players pumping in large sums of money to establish their leadership with the help of huge advertisements as well as discounts, many flagship smartphones are available at up to 30 to 40 percent discounts on their retail prices. All this gives users the notion that buying a device online would be cheaper instead of getting it from their friendly neighbourhood store.
91mobilescom conducted a recent survey which shows otherwise.
91mobiles.com took a sample of 30 popular smartphones from a number of brands like Samsung, Nokia, HTC, Micromax, Panasonic, etc. and got their pricing from numerous brick-and-mortar stores located in Delhi NCR and compared them to the pricing of online retail websites. Also for this purpose, they took prices from the three most popular online retail stores – Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal barring products which sell exclusively online.
The company also compared the pricing of offline stores with more online stores such as eBay, Infibeam etc. If one looks at the three lowest prices for each phone across the board, the offline prices of 11 devices in list of 30 phones actually figure as one of the three. What’s even more interesting is that flagship devices which costs upwards of Rs 30,000 are available at much better prices through retail stores instead of online.
