Last year I was working on an Indian site which was in the competitive Indian matrimony market and hence I am probably in a better position to comment on Indian marriage sites then probably most of the others. Unfortunately the site didn’t got traction and though it is still working and accepting users I don’t think after one year they are even near to breaking even.

The biggest problem for them was that they were in the niche which has players like shaaadi.com which is almost 8 years old and probably has over million members. The law of the Internet says bigger will keep on getting bigger and its very difficult to compete against them if they also have some competitive advantage against you, which shaadi.com certainly has which is the ability to take micro payment by going to members home, something which is not possible for other sites (except bharatmatrimony)

So What makes shaadi so special ? well here is my little review of shaadi.com from the sites design perspective to the working business and revenue model

1. The best thing that goes in shaadi.com’s favour is that they were the first in the market hence got the highest traction and branding. They are still the biggest brand and I am sure anyone who thinks about registering for matrimonial site thinks about them first.

2. From design and site structure point of view, shaadi.com does has pretty cool design though I think bharatmatrimony has probably better usability due to usage of ajax but I think most of the Indians browsing shaadi.com wont complaint about it. The only thing that is irritating is they are using google adsense, not sure why. They can instead use their own ads as using adsense not only looks cheap, I don’t think it even gives them good ROI. Another problem is the way they show images, in firefox, images don’t show fully as the windows don’t gets open. Its funny how they didn’t even bothers to check site compatibility with all browsers and versions.

3. The single most biggest factor which goes in shaadi.com’s favour is that they are able to take payment by going to users home. Now for most of the people who are willing to come in Indian Shaadi market (personally I think you will be wasting time as its too saturated unless you have something new to offer) you just can’t compete against this unique selling point of shaadi.com and bharatmatrimony (which is owned by infoedge group, the site which owns naukri and 99acres)
So this summarizes my review of shaadi and about India Matrimony market in general. Feel free to share your thought in comments below.

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