Inside the mind of an Indian online shopper: How & Where I spent my money online in 2014

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Last year, around the same I time I posted a quick analysis of my spends across various e-comm sites. Thought of repeating the exercise again and see what all changed

1) Split of orders across sites

Not surprisingly, I placed the most orders in 2014 on Paytm (close to 70%), followed by Freecharge (8%), Flipkart (4.3%), Amazon & Bookmyshow. Various cashback schemes run on Paytm are the reason behind the skew of order count

Talking about physical goods #1 was Paytm (Aggressive offers early on), followed by Flipkart, Amazon & Jabong

2) Split of spend across sites

The story starts to clear up a bit when we look at split of spend across various sites

While 70% of orders I placed were on Paytm, 52% of the money I spent online went their. Flipkart (17.6%), Jabong (14.1 %) & Myntra (3%) came next. The ticket size for Amazon has been quite less

3) Split of spend across categories

This is quite revealing for me. While last year I spend considerable chunk of money (spent online) buying books, this year books formed a very small piece.

35% of money I spent shopping online last year, was spent on buying Electronics (mostly mobiles) & related Accessories. 25% was spent on recharges/bill payments and a significant change towards Fashion with 22% of my spend went there.

Some Interesting Bits:
1) I spent more ordering food online than buying books (Still can’t believe it or Maybe I got better deals at books 😉 )
2) I spent more on Cab rentals than movies ( I don’t take cabs as much) and almost the same amount as I spent ordering food online
3) Between Fashion & Electronics – 57% of my money was spent

Purchase Summary
Orders placed: 321
Digital goods (recharges, bill payments and movies): 252

Money Spent: Rs 1,72,448
Money spent on Physical goods: 1,24,621

Closing Thoughts/points
1) I’m not the most savvy online purchaser but I do tend to compare prices before buying stuff and have started using mysmartprice and more recently buyhutke (Chrome plugin)
2) Online mega sales trigger my purchases (super surprised to find out, I ordered on Myntra this GOSF after a break of 1 year from last GOSF). Made purchases on Big Billion Day and even Myntra’s “End of Reason” sale today
3) While I preferred purchasing on desktop (ease of selection, multiple tables, price comparison etc). I’ve started buying stuff straight of mobile. While for many purchases mobile still serves as the initiation point of my purchases and the same happens other way around, I add items to cart on web only to order them later on mobile when free
4) Most of my purchases (especially Fashion) are impulse (discount driven If I can admit), while Electronics etc are kinda planned
5) I’ve jumped the ship completely when it comes to paying by card. Almost, all my purchases (90% +) are pre-paid now.
6) Myntra and Jabong have spoiled me with their super easy return/exchange policies and flow. I don’t think twice before ordering stuff from them as I know I can always get the product returned/exchanged if I don’t like it. They also have superb delivery timelines (24 hours is a regular)
7) One thing I miss shopping online, is “Lack of Price Protection”. What you buy today for Rs 5000 can be available for say Rs 4000 and Rs 3500 the next day. As a buyer, you obviously feel bad about it
8) Newly caught trend of using wallets to pay on various sites to get discounts and cashbacks is a good incentive to use them. I’ve used Paytm, mobikwik and Payumoney, depending on the offers they are running.
9) I’m yet to order specs, furniture, grocery, health & wellness and things from a lot of these categories
10) Product wise – Wishlist and Rating/Reviews are by far the most useful features. Also, I love the feature to sort/filter using discount/offers (or the lack of them).

Hope, this post would help folks working in e-commerce get “some more idea” of their *Customers*

Reset Password Form

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Forms are one of the most under appreciated elements of web design. Most interaction designers just won’t pay enough heed while designing them and thus the user frustration while filling all sorts of forms.

While using mailchimp I came across an interesting implementation of the password reset form so thought of sharing.

I’m not a fan of complex password policy, for obvious reasons

But, let’s say for some reason you need the password to match some criteria, this implementation works quite well towards

1) Communicating the exact requirements for a password
2) Active/real time feedback about which all conditions are met as user types the password

The Books You Think Every Intelligent Person Should Read

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Here’s a list of books which readers/followers of openculture.com suggested every intelligent person should read. How many of these have you read?

Foucault’s Pendulum,
Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Short History of Nearly Everything
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
Voltaire’s Candide
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
George Orwell’s 1984
Dante’s Divine Comedy
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Plato’s Republic
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha
Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
William Godwin’s Political Enquiry

Source: http://www.openculture.com/2014/04/the-books-you-think-every-intelligent-person-should-read-crime-and-punishment-moby-dick-beyond-many-free-online.html

The Rise of Mobile SDKs

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The last 2 engineers I spoke to who had quit their jobs to do a startup are working on building 3rd party solutions for app developers. There is clearly a trend of more folks trying to build services for various apps. From Analytics to payments, ad networks to notifications, there our services for everything, even Emotion Tracking and Augmented Reality.

How these 3rd party services tend to be used across various apps is by integrating their SDKs (essentially including code libraries from other providers into your apps).
Let’s consider an example of an e-commerce mobile app. Here are some of the features/attributes
which might be needed

SDK

Accepting Payments
Analyzing usage (clicks, pageviews, conversion funnels etc)
Sending notifications (push notifications about offers/promotions etc)
Campaign Management (to track installs and their behaviour from various paid install campaigns)
A/B testing
User Engagement/Rewards
Messenger/Chat and so on

This list would vary from app to app and the developers have two options, Build each one of these functionalities or integrate existing solutions (Mobile SDKs that provide one or more of these services). While the benefit of integrating an SDK to do say user behaviour analysis is immense (and in most cases the only option and you can’t possible build this functionality on your own) it is where the problem starts and one wonders, “how will this scale?”

SDK overload (via @WahWhoWah)

How many SDKs can you possibly embed in your app? The performance and maintenance issues are plenty. While from app developers perspective the challenges are obvious (which ones to choose, how to migrate data from one to another in case of switching, how to attribute any problem to one SDK in case of multiple SDKs etc), what worries me is how upcoming start-ups with their business model built around offering SDKs to developers will come about.

Distribution, is possibly the most important thing for a startup and I foresee getting various app developers to use your SDK (and not building a cool service) as the biggest barrier to entry/success.

I’m sure you might have built a great user analytics/customer lifecycle management/campaign management etc SDK but how many SDKs can a developer possibly try and integrate?

Concluding Thoughts
1) Building an SDK that offers to replace an existing/prevalent one like Flurry or Mixpanel though comparatively easier to build will be extremely tricky to distribute/sell
2) Building an SDK that offers to replace multiple existing/prevalent ones (Flurry, Testflight, Admob etc) though extremely difficult to build will be comparatively easier to distribute/sell
3) Mobile platforms (Apple/Google etc) might improve their offerings around various fundamental needs and start including them into the platform APIs like iOS did with Facebook and Twitter. A native Analytics/campaign management service will be difficult to compete with
4) Some app developers might be privy to share their data (for say Customer Lifecycle Management SDK)

This space is quite exciting and I’m really interested to see how it shapes up. What do you think?

Chamath Palihapitiya’s Resignation Email (from Facebook)

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From Quora

i leave with incredible hope for how you will continue to make this place awesome. every tuesday, i talk to the n00bs. and i generally tell them the following, which i leave for you as a reminder:

its easy to get distracted. everyone thinks we are much better than we actually are. be humble and honest about the fact that more is left to do than has already been done. keep moving quickly and don’t get bogged down in the things that don’t matter.

we risk becoming like everyone else. the only chance we have is the discipline and resolve of the silent majority who needs to and MUST become more vocal as the company gets bigger. fight for the culture the way it should be…not the way it was or the way its becoming.

be afraid of the company you don’t know. there is someone out there lurking with a small idea that will grow into a giant. don’t ignore that which you don’t immediately understand and keep pushing to evolve faster than what people expect. it can create unease at times but its our only path to long term relevance.

speak the truth. its too easy to “manage” – upwards, sideways, downwards and be rewarded for it. this is death. speak candidly especially when it means it won’t be well received. respect the person but don’t let bad ideas go unchallenged.

their is more valor in failure than success. success is hard to define and hard to isolate root causes when it happens. its rare to learn much of anything from success except to conflate luck and skill, but you learn tons in failure. take enough risks that you continue to fail…and celebrate those so that it becomes the battle scars you talk about when you do eventually succeed.

don’t be a douchebag. this is pretty self-explanatory but its not about the right to ripstik or the quality of the candy bars in the office. its about winning. everything else comes second….a distant second. and the perceived correlation between winning and the rest is only in your mind. interestingly so is the resolve and focus to win.

i’ve really enjoyed my time here. thanks again for the chance to always say what’s on my mind. its a rare place that allows everyone to do that and our results speak to the values of risk taking, openness and transparency. don’t betray them as we move along.

good luck. make it rain.
chamath

My experience with Pebble: The smart watch

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I’ve been longing to buy a watch for quite some time now but wasn’t sure which one to buy. But, when I got to know about Pebble, I kinda knew that this would be it. A smart watch which does more than telling time and looks good/different was enough for me to make the purchase, plus I also wanted to experience the wearable tech market first hand and this was the cheapest way in.

Thanks to the lovely friend who got it for me from the Amazon US.

Otherwise priced at 150$, along with the Skinomi cover it costed me Rs 11063/-. I got the watch some 10 days back and here’s my experience with it so far

1) Look & Feel – As someone wise said people buy watches not because they tell time but because of their fashion/design appeal (Apparently the watch market is worth $ 80 bn). The watch looks great and is comfortable to wear. It’s shape and finishing makes it stand apart

2) Integration – Pebble connects with your phone (Nexus 4 in my case) using Bluetooth. All one needs to do is to install the Pebble app in your phone and detect/connect it with the watch. Do this and you are done.

3) Frills: Watch faces and Shake to lighten up – Using some apps you can create/install new watchfaces. My current favorite is the “Breaking Bad” watchface. Another cool thing is that you just need to shake the wrist a bit and the watch lightens up

4) Features – Pebble comes with a few default features

a) Music – You can play/pause music on your phone using pebble (Though a cool thing, I am yet to find a real/proper use case). Though I did a fun thing once by playing music on phone which is connected to the car’s audio system using pebble (Bluetooth ahoy !!)

b) Alarms – You can set alarm on the watch (I am not much of an alarm person anyways)

c) Watchfaces – You can choose from various existing watchfaces and upload new ones

d) Notifications – The core offering of Pebble and few other watches is the Notifications part. The underling thought behind all this being, that the smart watch in it’s current avatar is not a replacement of phone but an extension of it. Some of the use cases being in situations where you can look into your watch before deciding whether you need to take that call or reply to the sms etc.

Some of the notifications that work with Pebble are

1) Gmail
2) Whatsapp
3) SMS

4) Calls

5) Integration with other apps – This one is very interesting. Pebble for one integrates seamlessly with Runkepper. Unlike earlier, now I don’t need to keep checking my phone to see how much I have run or calories I burned. The phone can stay in pocket while Pebble can tell me all the needed details.

6) Installing third party apps – The most exciting bit is you can install apps developed by others on your pebbles to further exploit the device and it’s functionality. Here are some of the features you get access to using these apps

a) Reading and replying to SMS – Limited to a few template replies at the moment
b) Weather information
c) Calender
d) Utilities like “Find my phone”

I have few more apps which I plan to explore and also I am eagerly awaiting the launch of Pebble’s App Store for Android (They recently launched one for iOS).

If you own a Pebble, what has your experience been like?

2013: My year on Indian e-commerce sites

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Just had this idea of checking and analyzing how much money I spent on various e-commerce sites and doing what. So here’s a quick post sharing the same with the hope that it might be of interest of people running various e-commerce sites or thinking of doing so in future.

In the year 2013 I swiped card/availed COD across Flipkart, Jabong, Myntra, Amazon etc. Here’s quick glance of my purchases

1) Flipkart – Items Purchased: 58, Amount Spent: Rs 50,218

Average price of a book I purchased on Flipkart is Rs 299 and average price of a footwear is Rs 876 (3 shoes and 4 sandals/flip flops)

2) Amazon.in – Items Purchased: 7, Amount Spent: Rs 6,598

Great thing about Amazon is that it already provides you an option to see all the purchases you made in that year
Here’s the split of purchases (6 books worth Rs 1,599 and a Kindle worth Rs 4,999)

3) Jabong – Items Purchased: 1, Amount Spent: Rs 1280

*I actually bought two items but had to return one for poor quality (return process was super smooth though)

Purchased a clothing item worth Rs 1280 during GOSF

4) Myntra – Items Purchased: 2, Amount Spent: Rs 3854/-

Purchased two clothing items worth Rs 3,854/- during GOSF

5) Others

a) Yepme: Items Purchased: 2, Amount Spent: Rs 998/-
b) Inkfruit: Items Purchased: 7, Amount Spent: Rs 3,738/-
c) Shopclues: Items Purchased: 1, Amount Spent: Rs 42/-
d) Bookadda: Items Purchased: 1, Amount Spent: Rs 667/-
e) Purplle.com: Items Purchased: 1, Amount Spent: ~ Rs 2500/-

Summary (Items Purchased: 80, Amount Spent: Rs 69,895/-, Spent some 8K during GOSF, alone, Spent some 11K on online bill payments/recharges)

A peak into my mind as an online shopper
1) Convenience very important but not more important than discounts. Moved my bill payments online. I do all my bill payments and DTH recharges on Paytm
2) Almost all my purchases have been via desktop (haven’t got myself to buying things via apps/mobile site yet.)
3) I’ve crossed the chasm from COD to swiping cards. I now prefer to pay online for most of my purchases. I don’t hesitate to swipe card for my first purchase on sites I’ve heard good deal about (Myntra, Jabong, Shopclues etc). Earlier my first purchase on a new site was on COD
4) I got comfortable enough to made a big ticket purchase (bought a laptop for around 30K from Flipkart)
5) Discounts/Offers have an influence on my purchase behaviour (both on pre-decided buys and impromptu purchases). I spent some
6) I trust most sites to deliver goods on time, offer quality goods and a customer friendly return/exchange policy
7) Flipkart’s scan (barcode) and search feature is quite handy for a quick online vs offline price comparison
8) I’ve grown to compare prices across sites before buying anything. I definitely use mysmartprice to compare book prices
9) Wishlists and notifications are a great way for me to store items and decide when to purchase
10) As a heavy user I’ve figured some hacks to avail the max discount on certain items across some sites;-)

The Feedback Loop

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One of the things that I feel that makes certain people and organizations tick while others don’t is ‘The Feedback Loop‘. I believe most(all?) successful people/companies have a good feedback loop which helps them gather external information, couple it with internal hunches/insights and improve their course of action/style of working.

“The Feedback Loop” is a great tool when you are learning something. It could be internal/self imposed practice->finding gaps->closing them or taking feedback/help from someone else/internet and improving your skill. This is purely an execution skill. Figure out how can you best assess your current level(the more sources the better), and then use your sense to improve yourself

For instance: If one were to learn a foreign language remotely. They can
Watch videos, join an online course, study tutorials, read a book or use an interactive app.
An evolved brain would be able to choose the best options from the above mentioned which in turn would help them by leveraging the benefits of feedback loop. Let’s say an app which let’s them not only learn the language but also practice it and rate their skill set and provide suggestions

Similarly people/organizations which have evolved, have a tight feedback loop (Identify gaps/scope of improvement ->Have yourself/team figure out how to fix them->repeat) which serves as a continuous self improvement process. Like the perennial structured software testing which never stops and is actively followed up with not only bug fixes but also some learning in the system which ensures that such mistakes are not repeated again. To make the process water tight, there’s a metric/check in place which makes sure that learnings are executed and not lost

Most people are not good at taking direct feedback and thus end up seeking only the indirect feedback if at all. Which needless to say is less efficient. They are anti-feedback types, every time honest feedback about their abilities is pointed out, they start looking in opposite direction. If only they could set their egos aside and taken in as much as they can without bothering the form and source.I’d blindly side a guy who has figured out a way to improve themselves/their work on their own.
Implement –> Test/Seek Feedback –> Learn –> Fix –> Repeat

At a organizational level, there are various sources of feedback, namely employees, customers, partners, investors(if any). If you don’t have a process of continuously seeking their feedback, logging data in a structured format, analyzing it and using the insights to improve the ways things are done, you are missing out a lot.

Got any thoughts on ‘Feedback Loop’ for individuals and organizations?

Delhi Elections: Exit Polls vs Results

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The results are out and the winner is ‘Aam Aadmi Party’. A start-up that growth hacked itself to become the second highest seat winner. Here is how 2 exist polls compared to the results

While Today’s Chanakya Exit Polls data were closest to the results, Times Now (except for their spot on BJP Exist Poll data) are way away from the results. Good Job ‘Chanakya’ !!

Now to take a macro view of the Chanakya exit polls and results

All Things Startup

Thoughts on Growth, Product Management & Strategy

Inside the mind of an Indian online shopper: How & Where I spent my money online in 2014

Reset Password Form

The Books You Think Every Intelligent Person Should Read

The Rise of Mobile SDKs

Chamath Palihapitiya’s Resignation Email (from Facebook)

My experience with Pebble: The smart watch

2013: My year on Indian e-commerce sites

The Feedback Loop

Delhi Elections: Exit Polls vs Results