11 June 2026 : Walk through any market in India (the wholesale gullies of Surat, the morning
mandis of Pune, the kirana lanes of Lucknow, the crowded electronics markets of
Chennai) and you will hear the same low hum of commerce. Prices being named.
Countered. Pushed back on. Adjusted. And finally, with some performance of
reluctant agreement on both sides, landed on. The transaction completes.
Everyone moves on.
This is not a habit
that is fading. According to a joint report by Boston Consulting Group and the
Retailers Association of India, more than 80% of
India's $940 billion retail market is still unorganised: the local
stores, street markets and neighbourhood vendors where bargaining is simply how
things work. The same report confirms that over
58% of all Indian retail purchases still happen offline, even as
India has become the world's third-largest market for online shoppers.
A separate PwC Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey, India perspective
(June 2023) finds that around 66% of Indian consumers, well above the global
figure of 56%, almost always or frequently use their smartphone to research
products for competitive prices, special offers and availability before
purchasing. India is not price-passive online. It is actively searching for a
better deal. It just cannot ask for one.
India's e-commerce
industry, valued at $125 billion in 2024 and among the fastest-growing in the
world, has not found a way to include any of it.
That is the gap a new
platform called Gajab.com is now attempting to close.
What
E-Commerce Took Away
The story of Indian
e-commerce is largely a story of convenience. Faster delivery, cleaner
interfaces, one-click payments, next-day fulfilment; every major improvement
has been about removing friction from the path between buyer and product.
What did not survive
this process was the buyer's voice in setting the price.
In traditional Indian
retail, pricing is not a finished statement; it is the opening of a
conversation. The seller names a number. The buyer reacts. Something happens in
between that gives both sides a sense of having arrived at a fair outcome
together. This is what Indian shoppers mean when they talk about a bargain. Not
the discount. The process.
“The
buyer can accept or leave, but they cannot participate. That layer of the
transaction has been designed out of existence.”
Indian e-commerce
replaced this process entirely. Discounts are real, but they are the platform's
decisions. Coupons exist, but they appear when the platform decides. Flash
sales create urgency, but not agency. The power to influence the final price
has never passed to the buyer's side of the screen.
What makes this more
notable is that it was not inevitable. International platforms like eBay had
built pricing flexibility into their models through bidding and offer
mechanisms long before Indian e-commerce scaled. A buyer in Germany or
Singapore could submit an offer on a listing and bargain toward a price. That
feature never made it into the Indian shopping experience, despite India being,
by most measures, the world’s most price-sensitive large consumer market.
The
Founder
Shahnawaz Merchant, who
founded Gajab, spent years as a seller on international e-commerce platforms
including eBay, trading with buyers across Singapore, the United States, the
Middle East and Germany. The contrast he observed there was direct.
International buyers on those platforms could make offers. They could submit a
number and wait to see what happened. That back-and-forth (the digital
equivalent of the bazaar exchange) was built into the experience as a standard
feature.
Indian e-commerce
offered none of this. The platforms had chosen speed and scale over
participation. Merchant watched the industry move further in that direction,
more automated, more frictionless, more fixed, while the country’s actual
retail behaviour stayed stubbornly unchanged in its preference for the bargain.
The
Platform
Gajab, available on
Android, iOS and at gajab.com, is built on a single premise: give the buyer a
say in the price.
The platform lets
buyers submit what they consider a fair price for any listed product (what
Gajab calls the buyer’s "Mera Right
Price"), a deliberate play on MRP (Maximum Retail Price), the
printed figure that has always told Indian consumers what a product costs,
without ever asking what they think it should.
An automated bargaining
engine evaluates each offer against the seller’s pre-set floor price and
parameters and responds, without any direct interaction between buyer and
seller being required. Sellers define their floor and their bargaining range at
the time of listing. Buyers submit an offer. The platform handles the exchange.
The average bargain completes in under 30
seconds, faster than checking prices across two competing apps.
Gajab has launched in
beta across India with 5,000 SKUs across three
categories: toys and games, home and kitchen, and stationery. The
company is targeting 25,000 SKUs before the end
of the current quarter, more than doubling its opening catalogue
within 90 days of going live.
The category choices
carry a logic. Toys and games are bought for occasions (birthdays, festivals,
gifts), making buyers particularly price-conscious and motivated to seek a
better deal. Home and kitchen and stationery are repeat-purchase categories
where comparison shopping is already standard behaviour. These are buyers who
are, in effect, already looking for their right price. Gajab is the first
platform to let them say it.
What
Early Users Found
Among buyers who tried
the beta, Goutham from Bangalore described his first experience plainly. "Finding
a bargain feature like this online was a complete surprise," he said.
"I loved my first bargain and placed my order right away."
On the seller's side,
Sagar Navapara, Proprietor of Unique International, said the speed of his first
conversion stood out. "I got my first order within three days of going
live on Gajab. It is the easiest marketplace I have listed on."
The Larger Bet
The problem Gajab is
attempting to solve is hard to dismiss. Deloitte and FICCI data shows that Tier
2 and Tier 3 cities now account for over 60% of e-commerce transactions in
India. These are markets where bargaining has not retreated into nostalgia. It
is a current behaviour, practised daily in physical retail. As digital commerce
expands deeper into Bharat, the gap between how those consumers shop offline
and what online platforms offer them is not closing. It may, in fact, be
widening.
Indian e-commerce has
spent a decade asking India to shop differently.
“Gajab
is asking India to shop like itself.”