Its warning bells for Flipkart, Amazon! Snapdeal is the cheapest online store!

It seems etailers such as Flipkart, Amazon need to pull up their socks. If findings of a survey are to be believed, Snapdeal has become the cheapest online store of mobile phones this year.

According to the study conducted by Pricebaba, a location based product search engine, Snapdeal offered the lowest price on 51 products, of the nearly 100 mobile phones surveyed by the firm. On the other hand, Flipkart and Amazon offered lowest rates on only 23 and 20 products only.

“On the day of creating this report, the Apple iPhone 6 Plus 16GB is cheaper online with a price tag of Rs 50,900 listed on Snapdeal whereas the lowest price for the phone offline is Rs 54,000 in Mumbai. The difference between this is Rs. 3,100 which is a considerable saving,” said Ruchika Mahimkar, market associate with Pricebaba.

The report, which primarily focuses on the war between online and offline prices of the mobile phones, also suggested that out of 150 phones that were surveyed, 94 products were available online at dirt-cheap prices while only 56 mobile phones were cheap in the offline store.

Interestingly, while mass brands such as Micromax have shifted their focus on the distribution from physical to virtual retailing to ramp up its sales, market leader Samsung and other brands such as Sony and Lava, still bet big on offline retailing and has been clocking in its majority sales from its physical retail stores.

This is interesting since Samsung, which continues to rule the smartphone market in the second quarter of the year with 24.3% market share, lost 3.3.% of the smartphone pie in the same period. On the other hand, Micromax, which had 15% market share, gained 1.4% in the last quarter and currently has 16.4% market share in the segment. This change in the figures could have been influenced by the brand’s decision to stick to the offline retail format.