Buying phones online may not be cheaper than store prices: 91Mobile study

29th October 2014
Buying phones online may not be cheaper than store prices: 91Mobile study

Bangalore, October 29 2014: Contrary to the popular notion that online prices for smartphones are lower than offline stores, the truth is that physical stores match or sometimes even offer better pricing, finds online mobile research and comparison portal 91mobiles.com , after a  recent study.
They took a sample of 30 popular smartphones from a number of brands like Samsung, Nokia, HTC, Micromax, Panasonic, etc. Then they got their pricing from numerous brick-and-mortar stores located in Delhi NCR and compared them to the pricing of online retail websites. For this purpose, they  took prices from the three most popular online retail stores – Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal. Of course, these don't include the devices which are sold exclusively online. The pricing from offline stores was taken on the first week of October, while the pricing for online retail websites was taken on October 5. Some of the devices might be selling even cheaper because of festive offers, but since those are limited-time deals,  they were not considered.
The 30 smartphones, mentioned along with their MRPs, minimum pricing and maximum pricing with regards to offline stores, and then the pricing from the e-commerce websites can be found in the 91mobile blog here.
The company also compared the pricing of offline stores with more online stores such as eBay, Infibeam etc. If   one looks at the three lowest prices for each phone across the board, the offline prices of 11 devices in  list of 30 phones actually figure as one of the three. What’s even more interesting is that flagship devices which costs upwards of Rs 30,000 are available at much better prices through retail stores instead of online.