Bechna is a great name for a comparison shopping site in my opinion. Where do people come up with names like singdeals and ultop?? Weird. Well Google was weird too. So its always better to look at the facts and numbers.

Here is the latest look at the 1 week Alexa Rank for 3 of the top sites I found in this segment: ultop/tolmol, http://www.singdeals.com, http://www.bechna.com

(Leader) Bechna: 1 week Alexa Rank: 223,325 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.bechna.com

(2nd place) Singdeals: 1 week Alexa Rank: 449,634 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.singdeals.com

(Last place) tolmol: 969,722 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.tolmol.com

Couple of points to note. Alexa is not precise but is a good indicator of traffic. If anything these numbers underestimate the traffic to the sites in India as the Alexa toolbar is not widely used over here. But for comparison purposes it is very useful.

From the above numbers its quite clear that Bechna is the early leader, followed by singdeals and ultop/tolmol. Once again, this does not mean that Bechna is the best..but it does look like its the most used.

In India we still have making maximum profits typical mentality where even online sites fail to offer lower prices and also in few cases goods seen on website & ones delivered are like poles apart. I have very bad experience with rediff.com & bazee(now ebay.co.in) where products were of inferior quality & seller refused to honur agrrement and take them back.

In terms of books any local shop gives 20% discount on most of educational to other books where as in online sites u get almost none + u have shipping charges.

Potential is there but there are many lacking things in eShopping system in india which still forces people to crowd as nearby stores.

Regards

http://ileher.com/2007/01/19/hungry-for-online-deals/

I would like to summarise the big picture. Draw a big circle for search engine. Draw a smaller circle within that for comparision search engine. Draw another circle within shopping comparision for deal aggregators. These are interesting views on same set of product data on the web. And to enable these views, we will have enablers (middle man as you called them in the post). Revenue will flow from sellers to the enablers to the view providers.