With that money, you could buy the whole Harry Potter set 16 times.
Now that’s some BMW amount of money.
Let’s compare the Prices.
At a glance, we can see that about 25% of the books are priced almost the same.
By looking at the distribution of the prices we can see that the proportion of positive percentages increases to the right.
Which means compared to Flipkart, about 20% of the books are priced cheaper at Amazon.
Let’s go ahead and take a quick glance at the data of books worth less than Rs 500 to see if the pattern holds up.
It clearly reveals that for books that are cheaper, Amazon still holds the advantage.
As the books get more expensive, that is more than Rs 500 the pattern still holds up and Amazon wins.
Yo, your mind’s still not made up?Let’s do one more analysis to make up your mind.
My friend, Dr Doe, only shops on Amazon whereas I prefer Flipkart for whatever reason.
Let’s see how Dr Doe would fare if he bought all the 713 books in question from Amazon.
Amazon has better pricing 45% of the time compared to Flipkart and Dr Doe would be overpaying compared to our best case cart by only 6%.
On the other hand, I, after buying the whole cart from Flipkart would get better pricing only 30% of the time and I would end up overpaying by 8%.
Well you gotta agree, it’d be hard to beat Amazon pricing on books cause our favourite E-commerce marketplace started by selling books.
ConclusionMoving on (finally) to the actual point of all of this, deciding which site you should actually use.
Well, here it seems Dr Doe has the advantage for books.
That is Amazon.
Overall the best idea is to check and compare both sites to get the best deal.
But if you’re too lazy to compare and buy books, you could stick to Amazon all the time and they’ll provide the better or equally good deal 70% of the time compared to Flipkart.
Project DetailsTalking about price comparison of books, I was inspired to do this analysis after seeing Chase’ wonderful and informative post on comparing prices of Amazon Vs.
eBay.
But in that case you don’t have to do the manual comparison, his extension Unlooted does that for you, so definitely check it out if you’re from the US.
A huge shoutout to my juniors Corruption13, pranavmodx, Afnan-Navaz and voxetmohita for lending me a hand in this project!.You guys rock!You can find the kernel and the dataset that I did the analysis on Kaggle.
Feel free to go through and experiment on it.
The scrapper story probably needs a blog-post of its own.
We gathered about 50,000 books but we couldn’t join them together due to some technical hitches due to the ISBN.
Please share if you have any cool ideas for data analysis, I’d love to hear your thoughts!.