dipchand bihari
post news network
Bhubaneswar, August 11: Meet Sarada Prasad and Abhijeet Sahoo. These youngsters, BTech computer science students of National Institute of Technology (NIT), Rourkela, have started a portal, PennyIndia.com, which offers cash back benefits to consumers making online purchases from e-commerce websites such as flipkart.
The portal launched March 7, already has 3,000 registered customers. The story of PennyIndia began with the idea that a buyer is a penny-pincher looking for the best deals with the highest savings. “Every buyer wants maximum benefits on purchases; even a paisa matters. We thought we should launch a website that provides customers with the opportunity to save down to pennies and so named it PennyIndia.com,” Sarada Prasad said.
The website is registered as a private limited company, Grabbucks Intenet Private Limited, and “offers the highest cashback in the industry to the users who shop from online sites such as flipkart, amazon, snapdeal, paytm, dominoes and 100+ sites”.
According to Sarada Prasad, PennyIndia is the first and the only cashback site to have the feature of auto-withdrawal (when the cashback of the user gets confirmed, they send it to their withdrawal method automatically). The site also provides complete free registration to users and it also supports other e-commerce based start-ups. “We are likely to add features such as price comparison, exclusive coupons, affiliate network, and such August 17. It would be first of its kind in India,” Sarada Prasad said.
The website, the entrepreneurs claim, sees commerce to the tune of `15 lakh – `20 lakh a month, mostly in the form of mobile recharges.
According to Abhijeet, the uniqueness of PennyIndia is that it gives 95 per cent cash back to registered consumers, which is “the highest in the industry”. He says others offer only 25-30 per cent cash back.
“After 30-60 days of completion of a sale, the customers automatically get their cashback according to their payment preferences — either in the form of transfer to their bank accounts or through coupons,” Abhijeet explains. At present the portal runs on self-funding mode and was started on a capital of about Rs4 lakh. “The site needs more investment on design, content and maintenance,” Abhijeet says.
On how it all started, Sarada Prasad says he had come up with the original concept. “I wanted to be an ethical hacker and to start something on my own. I saw no opportunity to start up something for a long while. In the first year of my course, I thought of building a cashback site and that led to PennyIndia,” he said.
Sarada Prasad was joined by Abhijeet as he wanted to scale up the company. “I decided that Abhijeet was the best to be the co-founder of PennyIndia after many nights of discussions,” Sarada Prasad said.
The duo is now aiming at consolidation and expansion and “an online revolution like that of Silicon Valley in the state by the end of 2025”.