Review of Junglee
The Indian store is still in beta and its interface is different from what we are used to in the US-centric Amazon.com website. It is far more simple and sports about 12 million stuff including 9 million books and 3 million products from over 14000 brands in India including Unilever, Home Shop 18 etc in 25 main categories. There are 7 main departments – 1. Books, Movies & Music, 2. Mobiles, Cameras, Computers, 3. Home Entertainment & Video Games, 4. Baby, Toys & Games, Sports, 5. Clothing, Shoes & Jewelery, 6. Health & Beauty, 7. Kindle. Other categories that are less patronized less including pets and gardening are relegated to a catch-all category.
Similar to its American equivalent, Junglee allows customers to write feedback about the products, apart from “liking” it. However, the product reviews are not using the customer reviews already entered in the US site and thus is quite raw. Junglee also has algorithms to group related products together to suggest prospective customers with alternatives and complementary products when they are on a product page.
The site looks little dull compared to the background of the Amazon.com and is designed to keep a lower profile. This is a big difference from the often-busy looking Indian sites. It is easy to browse and scores quite high in UI metrics. Apart from selling products, Junglee also allows product sellers to place their ads in their site and as an initial offer they allows free product placements.
Indian ecommerce is quite crowded with the likes of Flipkart, Infobeam and dozens of startups apart from mainstream shops like Future Bazaar that have their online counterparts. So, it remains to be seen how Amazon is able to tackle the competition. I would expect that Amazon would beat its competition purely through logistics and its almost infinite capacity to invest in infrastructure.
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