ShoppingWish rebrands itself as Scandid with specific focus on mobile-first shopping experiences

Number of smartphone users is set to cross 250+ million by end of 2014, making India #2 in the world only after China. Mobile commerce is also growing at a rapid rate with popular e-commerce retailers recording unprecedented traction in shopping activity through mobile devices.

Keeping these in mind, ShoppingWish, a popular price comparison and product discovery portal has pivoted it’s focus to mobile-first and rebranded to Scandid. The rebranding is in line with its innovative barcode scanner app ‘Scandid’, which helps users find the best deals on products.

Scandid mobile app which was first released in September 2013, is the first app of its kind allowing users to scan the barcode on the product boxes or search by product names, thereby providing instant prices along with coupons for millions of products from more than 200 online retailers.

Talking about the reason to rebrand to a mobile first strategy, Madhur Khandelwal, co-founder Shoppingwish says, “People shop in a number of different ways. They shop at local stores, they shop online on the web, they shop on their mobile phones. Our goal has always been to help users with all their shopping decisions. Now since mobile is something that people carry with them always, having a mobile app makes it super easy to get help anywhere, anytime. Furthermore, smartphone has capabilities like camera, GPS which can be used to provide unique and innovative features such as barcode scanning, nearby store listings etc, which is not so easily possible to do on a web interface. Last but not least, India is a mobile-first country, in fact for many people mobile is the only way to access the Internet. Having a mobile app allows us to have a penetration that is not possible otherwise. Looking at all these factors we decided to provide an omni-channel experience, thus rebranding to Scandid and making Scandid available on Android, iOS and on the web”.

Scandid is available for free download on Android, iOS and on the web at http://scandid.in. Since its release, Scandid has surpassed 10,000 downloads across iOS and Android. Launched in June 2012 by Madhur Khandelwal and Sushil Chaudhari, the price comparison portal has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Sandeep Johri and other angel investors in May 2013.

Re-branding is a double edged sword, and a lot of things need to be taken care. When we ask Madhur on the rebranding experience, he says, “Rebranding is a big task. There are technical aspects you need to take care of such as domain migration, back end changes to make sure that the core system is not affected etc. On the user facing side, you have to evangelize your new identity, communicate why the new brand better represents what you do and build traction for the new brand. Most importantly you have to make sure that your day to day work and your product aligns with the new vision and identity. In our case, it has been a good experience so far going by how people are receiving the brand and the product and that’s what keeps us motivated!”.

The price comparison sector sees tough competition, with players such as MySmartPrice, FindYogi and PriceDekho. Given the current & future mobile penetration numbers, this rebranding is definitely a smart move and will give Scandid a first mover advantage in their domain.