Introduction to PriceMap: From Bricks to Clicks and Back to Bricks

2026-08-06 10:16:35 Miscellaneous

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India is home to an estimated 12 million mom-and-pop stores and they dominate the country?s ~$600 billion retailing business. Almost 95 percent of shopping is still done offline in India because customers still want to touch-and-feel, which can only happen at physical stores. The retail outlets have already made the investments, and now they only need online demand generation.

PriceMap, an early stage startup venture based out of NCR, is targeting this sector by offering a solution which brings the convenience of online shopping to brick-and-mortar stores. PriceMap has launched a a mobile app which generates footfalls for the mom & pop stores, riding on the online infrastructure created by online retailers like Amazon, Snapdeal, Flipkart etc. PriceMap does this by solving the biggest challenge faced by physical retail: the challenge of product and price discovery, i.e. how to find out which shop in the local market is carrying what you want and offering the best deal. Using PriceMap, a consumer, who found a product online which they wanted to buy, gets connected to the brick-and-mortar stores in the local markets who are carrying the same product with details of the deal that they are offering. And, PriceMap does this without asking the mom & pop store to digitize and upload their entire store inventory!

As per thinkwithgoogle.com, 3 out of 4 buyers actually prefer to visit and buy from a physical store, provided the following information is made available to them:
? Which store(s) in the vicinity carry the product that the buyer intends to buy
? Price of the desired product at the nearby store
? What else may be available at the store which is related to the item that the buyer wants to buy
? Availability of the same item or something similar in store/stock
? Store location/timings and directions to reach it

PriceMap app solves these top five problems for physical retailers with ZERO IT overheads!

Everyone knows that buying online is getting more and more popular, giving traditional shopping a run for its money. People prefer online shopping mainly for two reasons:
1. Convenience, convenience and convenience: Flexibility of a wider selection and virtual window shopping options enables all users to shop at their leisure and across multiple marketplaces. People with tight schedules everyday can shop online without disrupting their daily activities. On the other hand, even if you know what you want, it is not so easy to find out which shop in the neighbourhood could be having that product.. With the traffic and parking challenges, it is a huge task to hop from shop-to-shop just to find the particular store which has the product you want readily available in stock.
PriceMap solves this problem of product discovery in local retail. Sitting in the comfort of your home or office, by using PriceMap you can locate the exact shops, in neighbourhood markets, which are carrying the item you want to buy or are offering something similar.
2. Price: Online commerce also offers a price comparison component between various etailers on the click of a mouse. This is also a real challenge for physical retail. When shopping in local markets you are really never sure if you are being charged the right price! There is always a possibility that the next shop is offering a better price and therefore you tend to spend a lot of time in checking with few shops before making the purchase.
PriceMap also solves this problem of price comparision for physical retail. Using PriceMap, you can get all the deals offered by local retailers, for what you want to buy, and with a single touch of the screen get yourself the best deal!
Thus, PriceMap creates a level playing field between on-line and off-line by bringing the same level of convenience for product & price discovery to physical retail.
On price competitiveness between online and offline retail, in general, people carry the impression that online price is always cheaper. This is a big myth which has been repeatedly busted by the PriceMap buyer.
The PriceMap buyers experience has been that 95% of the time physical retailers are able to offer better price than online price. Take the example of Mrs. Arpita Singh from Karol Bagh. As per Arpita ?I couldn?t believe when a local shop near my home was selling the Philips Home Theater system about 2000/- cheaper than the one the price on Amazon.? Similarly, Mr. Rajesh Hiranandani was shocked to see a significant price gap in LG 1.5 Ton Split AC. ?I was surprised when I checked the price of a Split AC while shopping in Nehru Place. It was selling 2700/- cheaper than the price Snapdeal was offering? said Mr. Rajesh.
That the brick & mortar retail is always cheaper is understandable; as in the marketplace model in the end there is some retailer selling you goods online with additional overheads of pick-up, delivery, COD, return management, customer support and thousands of crores spent in online branding. There are no cost savings compared to conventional retail and only additional overheads. Whatever deep discounts were offered online were coming from VC-funded money which will anyway stop going forward; as under the new FDI policy a marketplace operator can?t influence the price on its platform in any way.
?With the new FDI policy preventing any VC-funded price manipulation in ecommerce marketplaces, we believe that it is a just a matter of time before people start seeing reversal in pricing discounts, i.e. mom & pop stores being significantly cheaper than the online etailers because the former is fundamentally a more efficient delivery chain than latter. Physical retail has been suffering only because of the inconvenience factor, which has been resolved by PriceMap ? says Suresh Kabra, Founder, PriceMap.
Differentiation & market traction
PriceMap is fundamentally different than any other venture in the hyper local ?O2O: offline to online? space. While all other O2O ventures follow the conventional path - the seller uploads the inventory and the buyer chooses what he/she wants to buy, PriceMap reverses this transaction flow. On PriceMap, the buyer determines what he/she wants to buy by searching online and sends a query to the retailer, who reverts with a ?have/don?t have? response. This radical shift brings a new level of convenience for both buyers and sellers, as
? Sellers don?t have to digitize the store inventory and maintain it on a regular basis
? Buyers are not restricted to any one catalogue. PriceMap rides on the usual online product search done by the buyer, via Google or his favorite ecommerce portal/app.

Launched in Q4 2015, PriceMap already has 1000+ retailers in its network in the NCR region, across verticals such as mobile, watch, home & kitchen appliances, home audio/video, camera and more. Despite being a new entrant in this overcrowded market, PriceMap seems to have carved a niche for itself. Nearly 15K consumers have installed the app and are using it to discover product availability and best prices in the local market. In the next five years, PriceMap is targeting about 5 million mom & pop stores selling goods across 47 product categories in 91 Indian cities.

To understand how PriceMap works, watch video https://youtu.be/ojOf4Ai-ag8.

PriceMap founding team has rich experience in entrepreneurship and the mobile/web ecosystem. Suresh Kabra, Founder, is a serial entrepreneur and thought leader whose last venture in mobile video space was acquired in 2013. Suresh holds a BE (BITS, Pilani), MS (Concordia, Montreal) and is an MIT, Sloan alumni. Shishir Dubey, Co-Founder, has deep experience in mobile/web development and holds MCA from Indraprastha University. Basabjit Dey, Co-Founder holds a BE (CS) from Bangalore University with rich experience in growth hacking of mobile apps.