Zelect – online selection tool for home appliances

Shopping online can bring you convenience but have you found yourself often stuck in a confusion while shopping for home appliances? Confusion as to what is suitable for your home and your family? But since October 2014, the confusion levels have gone down tremendously. How? All thanks to a Hyderabad based startup – Zelect.

Zelect is interactive buying guide or decision support engine for online shoppers. The service helps customers with guided questions and presents results based on the options chosen. It is usability driven selection process rather than feature driven.

Wondering how the founders of this firm, actually got the idea to introduce this kind of unique service? Well, the story goes like this – “I was planning to buy a water purifier online for domestic usage. That is when I observed that in an online store, first you have to select the feature -   type of water purifier – RO, UV, RO + UV? But they don’t tell you what is suitable for your home and your family, because it depends from usage to usage and person to person. So, I had to go through the entire buying guide to decide on a water purifier type. That is when the idea struck, and I thought that it would be great if I could build a technology oriented interactive buying guide, where customers can get suggestions for the right kind of product, by just asking a few questions.”

This firm went live last year in October and since then it has been benefiting the customers by providing them an online shopping guide for a wide variety of home appliances and electronics ranging from heavy appliances like Air conditioners, refrigerators, invertors, washing machines, purifiers, chimney hood, Television, vaccum cleaners and Microwave over to light electronics including hair dryer, power banks, external HDD and routers.

This website provides you an ultimate guide on how to buy the perfect appliance for your house based on your usage. It also has multiple blogs and articles on how to use that appliance and which are the best brands that fall under your budget.

This firm was built by two brother – Amjed Shareef and Umar Shareef. Amjed is a post graduate from IIT Madras, and is an early employee of Flipkart and has an experience of working at Amazon as well.  He has 6 years of software development experience. While his tenure at Flipkart and Amazon, he was able to witness efficient methods of building, scaling, sustaining best eCommerce systems and business.

Umar has four years of software development experience and has founded two other startups  – TravelMango.in,  and easycards.in .

“We loved the Zelect idea, my brother built the prototype and our friends said it is very helpful. After being passive for 6 months, it was attracting some interest. So finally I left my job and decided to make it bigger.” Says Amjed.

When we asked the brothers about their future plans, this is what he had to say – “It is global product, we are planning to launch to multiple categories and geographies. The product can be used to increase the conversion rate of online stores, so we are looking for online tie-ups as well for B2B customers.”

This startup is a one of its kind globally and thus obviously the brothers have a first mover advantage here. They are doing great since their inception, and are growing tremendously in numbers. They are getting a traction of 120- 200 unique users and are able to sell couple of products in a week.

So, you now know where to head to in case you are stuck while choosing the best home appliance for domestic usage.

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