I have had people pitch me this idea for years now, both for ride-hailing as well as other marketplaces.

It does not work.

All marketplaces already use their competitors’ prices as anchors for their own pricing. If you can scrape prices of items on these apps and display them on a UI, be confident that these players are also doing the same.

However, base price does not determine the final price you pay.

Every user segment (read my differential pricing post from December 8, 2024) will have different add-on fees and discounts.

Therefore, you cannot accurately calculate the final cart value.

Even worse? There is no solid business model here, at least for a quick commerce pricing aggregator. The affiliate model won’t take off. There is a natural friction between affiliate products and merchants. Margins are already low, and merchants will want to own the user relationship. They want users to open their app by default instead of going to an intermediary.

15 years back this model used to work. E-commerce was new. Every site wanted traffic on their platform, so coupon sites were pretty popular. Over time, affiliate commissions declined and many of these products became irrelevant.

Yes, you can run ads, but the revenue won’t be meaningful enough. Additionally, the discrepancy between pricing you show and what users will end up paying will lead to low retention.

It is important to argue both sides. So here is me trying to find reasons this might work.

Let’s say there is an actual shift in user behavior. This is again the kind of idea everyone loves. Everyone loves to talk about aggregators. For a price-conscious user, there is definitely a use case for comparing prices across multiple quick commerce apps.

This is why there was a lot of traction and love on the tweet about this website’s launch.

A few hypotheses:

  • The product actually works. I explained why it does not work - base price is not the same as cart price. But let’s say it does work. It has some accuracy and users develop this behavior of opening this website first. It captures the top of the funnel for quick commerce.
  • There is some data on people clicking the prices and they can show that they are influencing user behavior. This is easier on websites as cookie tracking works, but harder on apps. I talked about natural conflict between merchants and affiliate providers, but once the world moved to mobile it became harder to track user behavior across apps. And traffic on web is way too low compared to apps.

Yes, you can provide some coupon code that works on the mobile app. But then why would merchants provide you with a coupon so that you can own the top of the funnel and train users to come to your site to get coupons?

Or merchants create campaigns on some attribution tool and share these campaigns that deeplink the user from the affiliate to the app. And they can see how many users came from the affiliate and ended up purchasing in the attribution tool.

[My knowledge of attribution is a decade old, and I know Apple is making it harder to track users. So ignore if I am wrong.]

Let’s say somehow they figure out how to do that too - use some identifier across the funnel to earn attribution. Then you need to have the power to earn affiliate fees for directing traffic. You should be able to say, “Hey, I own top of the funnel. I show Zepto, Swiggy, Blinkit, Amazon and Flipkart Minutes. If you don’t pay, you won’t be there as an option and will lose a lot of orders.”

  • Or you get some upstart like Flipkart Minutes that does not have enough traffic yet, does not own the mindshare of quick commerce users, and tell them you would put them at the top of the options, and you can earn some ad revenue from that. Flipkart Minutes or Amazon is not the BUMO (Brand used most often). They are probably not even in the top 3. So they can use this product to position themselves versus the others, show far lower prices, and influence user behavior. And once they get enough users to come directly, they can stop paying this site.