Amazon took a totally orthogonal path with it’s entry into e-commerce in India. It has been speculated that they tried to buy Flipkart, been busy building a warehouse, instead launched as a gatekeeper to products with discovery and comparison site Junglee.
With the amount of money Flipkart, Makemytrip, Snapdeal, etc have been throwing in advertising it became a calling that the online commerce winner would be the one who brands it most and goes out and pops out it’s head on TV, print and other traditional media.
For an uniformed Indian getting onto the Internet for the first time and not knowing where to go and who to trust brings the gatekeeper’s role in the front. As Alok pointed out in his blog post, Google does a crappy job of product discovery. In the west, very few people buy via a search engine, instead they have their favorite e-commerce sites to go to. The Indian online audience is just getting onto the Internet with close to 100 million actives. For them the celebrated bookmarks of the west like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. don’t exist. How does Junglee help where an average netizen going onto the Internet for the first time and traditional retailers who haven’t gone online with their inventory? Here’s what I think.
Curated sellers in a country where there are few laws protecting the buyers The Indian internet audience buying from over SEO-ed, fly by night operators is fraught with hole-in-the-pocket scenarios as the laws around protecting the customer’s interests are very weak. Try arguing for a bad charge on your credit card, or try following up with a merchant who shipped a bad product without return guarantees. Junglee’s opted-in curated sellers may provide at least some validation before making a buying decision.
Breathing room for small ‘I-have-not-raised-$100m-for-my-e-commerce-site’ retailers Not many Indian e-commerce players shall raise enough money beyond the top 5 who will have all the cash in the world to build a brand. With Junglee potentially building a brand, it becomes a front-gate to your online buying needs. Niche sites selling to the hobbyists have a shot in the arm. They don’t have to get lost into eBay’s marketplace where the product display looks like a badly done Web 1.0 page.
Opportunity for large offline businesses to go online with their inventory Every city has retailers with established supply-chain and delivery network, where they have been successfully delivering locally. With someone else taking care of the online presence, it becomes easier to increase the reach within the city by connecting to the local audience. These retailers who are not as big as the cross-country chains like Croma, Reliance Digital, etc. get to play together. The neighbourhood photography equipment-walla who has been successfully importing optics from Germany now stand next online with other giants. This is a huge gap–I’m sure Junglee is busy building tools for the same.
Finding a product on a shopping site and not a search engine Search engines fail at product discovery with peddling content around keyword arbitrage, affiliate marketing and SEO-ed to death sites pulling into the first few pages. A site focused exclusively on product discovery with pricing, recommendations has a better chance of giving what you want instead of a search result page infested with links, content and arbitrage.
Plotting the timeline, India’s B2C e-commerce is in 1997 whereas customers in the United States bought $142.5 billion worth of goods in 2011.
Initially, I used to bitch and moan how things got pulled under the rug due to interruptions. But, then I changed something. Instead of expecting a 4-hour time slice, I created intense 90-120 minute time slices. At each break, inter-twined the life with things which could be done by a support staff. For example, few weeks ago, I had to write half-a-dozen salary checks, which took a quanta of 10-minute; figuring out the exact amount, signing, stamping, sealing in a brown envelope and then delivering them to the respective desk. Earlier, I would push this task under the stack and keep bothering myself. This time, I planned the same. I walked into the office at 10:30a. Did a Skype call with a US colleague, started fixing a bug and then at around 2:00pm signed the checks and delivered them. Made me feel happy and was back to the groove for the next round and then after few hours called the furniture vendor inquiring about the status of our delivery and doing some general light-weight argument over the phone.
It has been a while since I posted something. Thanks to the new gig and attempting to build some world changing technology, the elements of giving gyaan have been taken over to writing and reviewing code, and then there are better gyaanis around.
Recently, a friend of mine moved back to India from the US, where he was working as a group product manager of a large accounting software company. Unaware of his recent move, when I called him after several months, it turned out he was working on a startup which was developing software to manage customer sales for Indian retailers.
Hiring in India is not easy. Generically, it’s not easy anywhere. In perfect markets the demand side and supply side are mature and there is no hidden element. In India, just like the Bombay Stock Exchange, the buyers and sellers are in dark, few people know the right price until they get into a transaction. There are great candidates who almost never know great companies who could be a match.