The best part about physical shopping, especially street shopping being able to bargain for the best price. What if you could bargain with online sellers as well? Flipkart wants to make it happen.
In the run up to the festive season, Flipkart has partnered with Google Zoo, the creative think-tank for brands and agencies, to launch “The Big Billion Days ka Boss”.
Customers looking to get the latest products at the best price will now be able to do so through voice-based conversations with the Flipkart Hagglebot on Google Assistant, available on Android and iOS devices.
Flipkart is trying to turn this into a fun and ‘rewarding’ experience for the customers by making haggling for a better price possible on a couple of products each day and at the end of the day announcing the winner as the ‘The Big Billion Days ka Boss’ and the product is made free to them.
Ensuring other customers don’t lose out, the lowest price knocked down by the ‘boss’ will be the price at which the others can also buy the products till the end of the Big Billion Days. It will also work on all Assistant devices - from the Jio phone to higher-end devices and Google Home.
It had already been reported that both Amazon and Flipkart will bring in a lot of technologies to drive their businesses and in wooing the Indian customers. There has also been this recognition that the Indian market could emerge as the largest market for these giants because the other contender, China has its own home-grown online retailers dominating the scene.
The Hagglebot can be considered as one more such technology-driven convenience feature to make the Indian buyers feel they are not missing that thrill of bargaining. In one manner, this could be like an auction engine where the customers quote the prices that wish to buy the product on offer. While in auctions, the prices keep going up with the bids, here there would be the reverse situation.
Explaining the work that went behind developing this Hagglebot, the representative from Google Zoo, the division that specializes in offering support to brands and agencies with their creative think-tank, said they worked in close collaboration with Flipkart and hoped the customers would find this experience immersive. The Hagglebot has been built with DialogFlow on Assistant, is powered by Google Cloud Platform, and uses Google’s Natural Language processing and Machine Learning expertise.