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eCommerce portal PriceOye.pk, a website that has two languages, English and Urdu is a price comparison shopping service that shows you automatically updated price lists of mobile phones from different stores. Online mobile phone price comparison services are finally introduced in Pakistan allowing shoppers to buy online.
Pakistanis are bargain hunters and there’s no secret about it. People who always make extra effort to save money. For offline shoppers, finding the best deals means going to markets dedicated to particular product categories. Good examples include Hafeez Center in Lahore or Singapore Plaza in Rawalpindi, you can find electronics for prices much cheaper than those in more expensive parts of the city.
If you are shopping online, in order to get the best deal, you have to individually visit all online stores to find the lowest price. With dozens of online stores, this can take hours of your time. Moreover, because there are just so many stores, you aren’t guaranteed to get the best, lowest price either — no matter how many hours you spend searching.
What is price comparison shopping?
Price comparison in the West is common. It may be new to Pakistan but the concept is simple.
You visit a price comparison shopping service to browse products by price, features, and availability. It allows you to quickly find deals that suit your exact shopping needs. This is different than going to just one store to buy an item (as is the case in America where people go directly to Amazon).
These price lists are sorted in ascending order, with the lowest price on top. In this way, you can instantly find the lowest price for a particular product.
Price comparison shopping is a relatively new concept in Pakistan. Before their inevitable rise, we have to use price estimation services. In fact, price estimation services are still the most popular ones in Pakistan. You can appreciate this by searching for “ABC price in Pakistan” where ABC is any product; price estimation websites like WhatMobile, and HamariWeb mobiles always show up top on Google.
The difference between price estimation and price comparison is, that price estimation services give estimated prices whereas price comparison services give you actual, updated prices in the stores.
It is far more accurate. It is also more convenient since you can quickly go to the appropriate store and buy the item directly.
PriceOye – Mobile phone price comparison
PriceOye.pk was launched in early 2016. It does price comparisons for mobile phones for brands like Huawei, Samsung, LG, Apple, and even QMobile, with support for more categories like laptops, tablets, cameras, home appliances, and others coming “soon”, according to the team.
All the biggest, old phones including the old battery-exploding Galaxy Note 7, and the headphone-jack-less iPhone 7 are listed on PriceOye.pk. The latest phones include the iPhone 12 series and Samsung’s new flagship models.
You can find the price lists of particular phones by browsing for brands from the sidebar on the left (image above). It lists in alphabetical order all mobile brands on the site. Quite easy and simple to use.
You can also search for particular phones by using the search function (image below). Once you start typing a query, it gives real-time search suggestions. Just click on any to search for that particular handset. We wish this were a two-step process, though: right now, it takes an annoying extra click to execute the search after clicking on a suggestion.
Mobile phone price-lists
Once you find your phone of interest, you see its dedicated page where the automatically updated price lists are clearly displayed. In our case, we searched for the latest iPhone models, and amazing prices to say the least for different iPhone models in Pakistan.
We liked the key features at the top which tell you the phone’s screen size, RAM, operating system, camera, and SIM options. These are the most common, core attributes of any phone, so having them under the phone’s name was convenient. Want to buy the latest iPhone 15 Pro Max, see the prices in the picture below.
Speaking of having something under the phone’s name, we were puzzled by the 5-star ratings. Were they made by users, or by the PriceOye.pk team? It would be useful if they made this clear. I was unable to find any way to leave a comment, much less a user rating option.
You can see the prices right below the phone overview. I saw different prices of iPhones from stores like iShopping, Shophive, Mega.pk, and Vmart. Each store is given its own rating. PriceOye.pk even shows if a phone is out of stock in a particular store.
It would be useful if PriceOye.pk included more information about each store. When I’m comparing phones across different stores manually, I keep an eye on payment options, shipping times, and warranty policies. Each store has different attributes, and I prefer Cash on Delivery, two-day delivery, and an official warranty for peace of mind. Without these attributes listed, I still need to visit each store link to find them out.
Other Categories:
The website also offers price comparisons for TVs, fridges, and ACs. EcoStat, Samsung, Sony, and TCL are featured in the TV category. Brands such as Dawlance, Gree, Haier, and Kenwood are featured in the AC category. The Fridge category includes Dawlance, Haier, Orient, and Pel.
A basic price comparison service
Price comparisons in other countries like India, the USA, and the UK are much more developed and have a number of useful features that help you narrow down the exact product and shopping experience you’re looking for.
Launched just a few years ago in Pakistan, PriceOye is a good starting point for a price comparison service. It provides basic features including but not limited to easy navigation, automatically updated prices on different product pages with detailed hardware specifications, and product overviews.
There’s huge potential when they add more categories and include more features like price drop alerts, specs, and price comparison across products, to name a few
