Case Study 2: Snapdeal Part 2

After Snapdeal started a SMS coupons ,they initially offered coupons for free. And thus number of users using their coupons rose to 180,000 users. Afterwards when they charged users Rs99 a month subscription fee , their users dropped to 1000. It is because , Rs 99 for just Sms and just showing the deals, is not worth at all . Users couldn’t get the look and feel of the product. And in the flurry of sms , it was difficult to find which coupon is useful to the user. Hence the user experience was impacted badly. And i think Rs 99 a month at that time was big amount for users. What they should have done it was they should have gradually increased the pricing of their coupons, they should have charged like Rs 20 a month for 4 months then after 4 months Rs 40 a month . And compare the customer retention . That’s all. And even in their business model , they could have charged vendors for promoting their products Via coupons. And try earning from both users and vendors. Thus lowering the price of coupons and resulting in customer retention more frequently.

Instead of pivoting towards SMS’s they could have build a website which displays all coupons , and charging a subscription fee from them . It would have improved the user experience vastly . It would have been easy for customers to search for coupons which they wanted.