Friday, August 26, 2016

Shocking facts of buying guides in India

We at Zelect (www.zelect.in) build interactive buying guides. The use case is like while selecting the products you don't need to read buying guides, you can use our tool and we will let you know the best features and  suitable products to you as well. Well in our mission of making the feature selection automatic, i.e. eliminating the need to read the buying guides we have came across few interesting facts.

First before even we build our smart selection tool we do literally one week research on buying guides. We read lots of buying guide, with that knowledge we write our algorithm and map our feature recommendations to products. Initially we have build the products just by reading the buying guides and we failed miserably. Here is our analysis.

Shocking fact - 1: Buying guides are USA orientated and NOT India orientated.
Yes, most of the bloggers and sites just copied/re-wrote  the same USA buying guides. Of course they did good SEO optimization on 'India' keyword. So that their page is top on the results. But unfortunately the guides are not 100% meant for Indian audiences.

Example: For room heating the guides talk about central heating systems which are not available in India. Many Chimney guides mention about types of Chimneys and suggest Mesh filters which are  suitable for western cooking only.

Shocking fact - 2: Buying guides are out dated and becoming irrelevant with time
Many buying guides of Microwave ovens talk about the microwave ovens that can be fixed in the wall. But these models are not available in India at all.  Then what is the point of mentioning about them in one page when at the end those products are not available in Indian market?

It happens with many products. The so called 'look for features' are not available in the Indian market at all or outdated and removed from Indian market. It is pointless to explain about CRT or LCD, even Plasma TVs and selection between these technologies when all of these technologies are out dated and LEDs are only available and ruling the market.

Shocking fact - 3: Buying guides are unnecessarily lengthy and with full of jargon
Yes, In the anticipation of getting top in the Google search results the buying guides are very lengthy. The buying decision points  can be explained in one page dragged to five pages. To increase the length of  guides, authors  usually introduce jargon and make further complicated.


Shocking fact - 4: Few buying guides are totally wrong
Yes, with out doing the total research the authors simple promote the wrong things.  Examples include many Air Purifier buying guide suggest to take Ozone Air Filters, which are very harmful to health and in fact banned in few countries. Many water purifier buying guides simple mention to take RO water purifier if the water is from bore well or hard, which is completely wrong.


We are on a mission to build automated buying guides and write contemporary, India relevant, short and well researched buying guides.