Axel Springer-Backed Comparison Shopping Site ShopAlike Enters India

Axel Springer owned e-commerce company Visual Meta GmbH has extended its fashion & lifestyle comparison shopping site ShopAlike to India by launching ShopAlike.in.  With this, ShopAlike now has presence in 16 countries globally. 

ShopAlike aggregates product listings from various online retailers in India and allows users to browse and compare products across categories like fashion, shoes, bags, jewellery, watches and furniture.  It also allows users to search for listings for any specific product and filter them based on gender, color, brand, prices or any particular online shop of their preference. 

Alternatively, one can also search for products from any specific brand or online shop.  At the time of writing this article, it lists products from online retailers like Flipkart, Infibeam, Jabong, Indiatimes Shopping, Homeshop18, Myntra, Zovi, and Fashionara among others. 

In a sense, its quite similar to how Amazon India’s Junglee works except that ShopAlike focuses only on fashion and lifestyle products, whereas Junglee offers comparison for other products as well.  Interestingly, ShopAlike doesn’t offer listings from Amazon’s India marketplace Amazon.in yet.  Note that Amazon.in is yet to launch its apparel category although it does offer products like bag packs, home decor and fashion jewellery. 

What’s also worth noting is Rocket Internet was the majority investor in Visual Meta until December 2011, when Axel Springer acquired 78% stake in the company for a reported €40 million. 

Axel Springer’s Investments in India

Axel Springer had picked up a 52.1% stake in the auto classifieds site Carwale.com in November 2010.  It had also picked up a 19.1% stake in India Today Group’s discount buying site Bag It Today and has a 49:51 joint venture partnership in India to publish the fortnightly magazine Auto Bild. 

It had also picked up 9.4% stake in IPGA Ltd., the Australian company that runs property portals under the brand name iProperty.com in India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines, through its French subsidiary SeLoger in June 2011.