Tag Archives: e-commerce

Flipkart Plus: Customer Loyalty Program by Flipkart

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Flipkart, the country’s biggest e-commerce company announced the launch of their loyalty program or customer benefits program (as they are calling it) on India’s Independence Day .

Launch Emailer

Here’s a quick summary of the program

  1. Opt-in membership with zero fee
  2. Free Expedited Shipping
  3. Exclusive access to promotional offers on Flipkart
  4. Reward points (coins) for purchases on Flipkart, which can be redeemed to buy offers on & off Flipkart (other vendors like Bookmyshow, Cafe Coffee Day)
  5. Superior & Priority Customer Support
Membership is just a click away

Flipkart Plus Landing Page

For an e-commerce company to become a sustainable business at scale, customer loyalty (aka retention) is a must. With increased competition and massive customer base, retention is the most obvious and un-avoidable path for all sizeable e-commerce companies, thus the recent public push towards launching loyalty programs.

Coming back to Flipkart, Flipkart Plus is their second attempt to launch a loyalty program. The first attempt was made in 2014.

Flipkart First (Launched in 2014)

‘Flipkart First’, ran for 2-3 years before the company quietly setting the sun on it. Since I was an active customer back then, I purchased ‘Flipkart First’ membership twice to avail the benefits. 

Here’s a quick overview of how the two programs compare with each other

Flipkart First Vs Flipkart Plus

Summarising the key changes:

1. Waving off Membership Fee 
2. No commitment over delivery time and charges
3. Adding early access to exclusive deals
4. Superior and Priority customer service
5. Introducing 3rd part offers and reward points

Let’s try to quickly unpack these changes

  1. Free Memberships:
    Positives — Increased Uptake
    Negatives — No additional revenue from membership fee

    IMO a loyalty program without membership fee is not reflective of brand power and will always restrict goodness you can provide.

  2. Free and Expedited Delivery:
    Positives — Increase in both order count (significant) and revenue (insignificant)
    Negatives — Extra shippings costs.

    Since membership is free and so is shipping, essentially users have no incentive to consolidate their orders and thus they can & will choose to place standalone order for low ticket items but will they spend significantly more because of this, I don’t think so.

  3. Early Access To Exclusive Deals (Actually just Exclusive Deals):
    Positives — Depends on quality of deals. Could lead to more orders & revenue
    Negatives — The deals on low ticket item products can put further pressure on shipping costs.

    The way I see it, I don’t expect great deals for Plus members. Let’s wait and watch on this.

  4. Superior & Priority Customer Service:
    Positives — Difficult to measure and communicate value to users. Negatives — If some changes are actually done at CRM, process and team levels. The costs for this could be significant.

    Unless a customer buys extremely regularly and interacts with CS often they can’t really see the difference. Even if the experience is better, I’d actually prefer to not having to talk to CS at all.

    Also, I’d never want customers to feel they are treated unequally. So generally speaking, I don’t like this feature.

  5. 3rd Party Offers and Reward Points:
    Positives — Additional benefit to customers, should bring some additional revenue from 3rd party. 
    Negatives — The offers currently are unpleasantly few and the usage terms are not friendly (to the point of discouraging impulse use).

    Giving formulaic reward points for purchases in form of coins could have been good had they allowed people to redeem them while shopping (think Paytm Cash) but in the current form, users can redeem coins to buy offers on 3rd party or Flipkart. First option currently is un-exciting and second one involves fair amount of friction
Expect a lot of low ticket orders like these

Unfriendly Terms: Of course I will remember all this two days in advance

Redeeming Rewards: 50 Coin Offers

50 Coin Offers 

Rs 250 earns you 1 Coin, so you need to spend Rs 12,500 to earn 50 coins. 
There’s also a catch, you can’t earn more than 10 coins in an order. So in effect, a user need to place multiple orders (5 big orders or 50 small ones) of Rs 250 or more to accumulate 50 coins.

Once a user has spend Rs 12,500 they are eligible for these offers 
– Rs 1000 worth free Flipkart Voucher (8% cashback)
– Rs 1200 worth BMS voucher or Rs 1900 worth Zomato Gold.

These offers are definitely interesting for regular customers as they get all these benefits for free.

Would people spend more often on Flipkart or move to Flipkart because of these benefits (more offers to come) would be interesting to see.





E-commerce Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM): An Introduction

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This is the first part of a series of posts on e-commerce customer lifecycle management. In this post we’ll discuss an overview of CLM (The What & Why) and it should be useful for a marketing/growth person in designing their CLM strategy

A few things to note:

  • Analysing data only makes sense once you have a sizeable amount of it.
  • In this post we are only covering user and customer engagement.We will cover visitor data in a separate post
  • For sake of simplicity in this post we are only looking at linear movement across different lifecycle stages.

There are a lot of lenses to look at e-commerce customer behaviour data from but Customer Lifecycle Management(CLM) is at the core of it all. I believe CLM is the fundamental element that needs to be in place for you to drive good ROI on your marketing or growth efforts. Once you have a defined CLM framework, you can start focusing on other aspects. Let’s dig a little deeper


What is Customer Lifecycle Management?
Customer lifecycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service.

Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is a framework to facilitate a smooth movement of users(non-purchasers) from acquisition towards loyalty (repeat active customers) by maximising the value delivered at each customer engagement touchpoint and removing all friction in conversion

                                    Pic 1: E-Commerce users’ Journeys

 

Why is it important to manage Customer’s Lifecycle?

  1. With limited customer acquisition channels, the customer acquisition costs will continue to rise unabated
  2. It is much easier to convert and retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one
  3. A happy customer will not only purchase more, they will also spread the word for you and bring additional customers.

Or put it other way,

“You can’t build a sustainable e-commerce business without repeat customers”

The Scope of Customer Lifecycle Management

Let’s briefly discuss what all does a CLM framework entail. We can divide the scope of work for CLM into the following

  1. Defining lifecycle stages, identifying relevant metrics and data
  2. Conceptualising categories of customer communication to nudge users from one lifecycle stage to the next
  3. Designing campaigns and creating content for categories defined above
  4. Executing various CLM campaigns and iterating on them to improve their efficacy.

Designing The Customer Lifecycle

While there’s no standard way to define a customer lifecycle for an e-commerce/transactional business, in my experience I’ve found this flow to do the job well.

                                           Pic 2: Customer Lifecycle (Basic)

This basic version of customer lifecycle is useful to get a high level overview and is easy to get started with.

                                        Pic 3: Customer Lifecycle (Advanced)

For the mature growth/marketing person, this advanced version of lifecycle will be beneficial. The advanced lifecycle is particularly beneficial for mid to large sized businesses.

I find this representation useful because it gives a more in-depth view of what exactly is happening in each lifecycle stage (Pic1). Also, by splitting various lifecycle stages by their purchase activity you get a better sense of how many customers are active, at risk of getting churned and have already churned.

Defining Lifecycle Stages
Before we jump to the metric, let’s quickly understand what each stage means.

                                     Pic 4: Definition of Various Lifecycle Stages

In this content, a couple key definitions one must understand are

  1. Risk Window — Number of days for which if a customer doesn’t purchase they are at risk of churning (X days).
  2. Churn Window — Number of days for which if a customer doesn’t purchase they are churned (Y days).

A churned customer is one who hasn’t purchased for long enough that we can consider them to be lost.

Repeat and Loyal Customers
There isn’t a definite way to define repeat and loyal customers. For sake of simplicity, I’ve defined repeat customer as anyone who has placed more than one order. Similarly, Loyal customers can be defined in multiple ways (orders/revenue etc) but I’ve defined them on the basis of number of orders (Z orders).

Depending on the nature of business, you can decide values for X,Y and Z

With the Customer Lifecycle in place, we now have to define our goals and make plans to achieve them. We’ll cover those in the remaining parts of the series.

Update: You can view the part two of the series in which we cover CLM Metrics and Goals here

Thanks Navneet Singh & Nitish Varma for reading the drafts.

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

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

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

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*

 

Analyzing Amazon.in Checkout Process

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I recently made a purchase on Amazon.in and couldn’t but wonder at their checkout process. Just too many clicks for comfort.
Here’s how it works at present

Step 1) Product Page 

Product Page - Amazon.in

 

Step 2) Edit Cart or Proceed Page

Edit Cart or Proceed - Amazon.in

 

Step 3) Sign in/Sign up Page

Login/Sign up Page - Amazon.in

 

Step 4) Delivery address Page

Delivery Address - Amazon.in

Step 5) Delivery options page

Delivery Options - Amazon.in

Step 6) Payment Method Page

Payment Method Page - Amazon.in

 

Step 7) Review Order Page

Review order page - Amazon.in

 

Step 8) Billing Address Page

Billing Address Page - Amazon.in

 

Step 9) Order Completion Page

Order Completion Page - Amazon.in

 

Phew !! With these many clicks Amazon is making sure that only the users absolutely committed to make a purchase are the ones who make one.

Nine steps to the order confirmation page. Wow. Let’s try to see if we can make things a bit better (less clicky)

  1.  The easiest way around would have been to allow ‘1-click checkout’. Which for some reason isn’t available.
  2. Step 2: The importance of this page is to help those who want to review their cart. Not sure why would Amazon want people to doubt their purchase, unless they have over the period seen people change their cart contents during later stages of checkout or raised a of issues complaining of shopping wrongly.They should encourage users to add more items ala ‘Continue Shopping’ as it is popularly known or checkout. Ideally, however there should be an analysis of the % of people who buy 1 item vs % of people who buy multiple items. The experience should be made smoother for the majority case. It could just be a pop up and not a new page
  3. Step 3: Is an important one. Auto-saved credentials make things easier. I am not getting into the design of the page as in this case, it gets the job done in a single click
  4. Step 4 and 5 : I don’t really feel the need of having two separate pages for choosing delivery address and delivery options unless there are multiple addresses and options in question. The assumption here is most people would order to a single address. This could however be validated by data on median delivery addresses. Assuming most people will not change their address during the flow, I think in the step 5 there should be an option to change address without giving it a separate page.
    UI could definitely be improved 🙂Delivery Address and Options Page - Amazon.in
  5. Step 6: This is perhaps the most important page. The option of putting saved cards makes things easy. Just enter CVV and continue. The layout of other payment options is a discussion to be had another day
  6. Step 7: ‘Review Order’. Wait, why would I want to review order after putting my payment details? Shouldn’t this page come before the payments page?  Step 7 should be Step 6. And Step 6 should be Step 7 with an option (selected by default ) “billing address to be same as shipping address”. An option to change billing address is going to be there of course. I simply don’t see a reason to have Step 8 “Choosing Billing Address” as a separate page.
  7.  Step 9: Order completion page. Informative and having some baits for users to view more items or make another purchase .So here’s the revised flowStep 1 (Product Page) – Page 1
    Product Page - Amazon.in
    S    tep 2 (Continue Shopping vs Checkout) to come as a popup on clicking Buy from product page and not a separate page
    Edit Cart or Proceed - Amazon.in
    S    tep 3 (Sign in/Sign up Page)- Page 2

    Login/Sign up Page - Amazon.inStep 4 (Delivery Address and Options Page) – Page 3

    Delivery address and options page - Amazon.in

    Step 5 (Review order page) – Page 4

    Review order page - Amazon.in
    Step 6 (Payments Page with Billing Address option) – Page 5

    Payment Method Page - Amazon.in
    Billing address option could also be a part of the delivery address and options page. But in no case it deserves a separate page

    Step 7 (Order completion page) – Page 6

    Order Completion Page - Amazon.in
    Though in the new order we are down to Six pages from Nine (33.33% lesser pages). I am sure this can be optimized by at least one more page by clubbing ‘Review Order’ and ‘Delivery Address and Options’ Page. For now 5 pages are good enough.

    Eventually a one click checkout for single product purchases is in order .

    What do you think?

The Rise of the Indian Online Marketplace

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If you are part of/related to the Indian e-commerce scene in any manner or read desi start-up blogs, chances are you might be familiar with the concept of Marketplace.

A “Marketplace” connects buyers and sellers who otherwise have trouble finding each other.

Marketplace(think eBay), is simply a model which has multiple sellers providing various goods/services through a platform. In the context of this discussion, an e-commerce website instead of sourcing and fulfilling the orders just manages the listing of products and passes on the order details to the sellers who then handles them.

Recently, India’s biggest online retailer (Flipkart) made their first move as a part of shift towards the marketplace set up.

To start with, Flipkart has on-board 50 sellers that will sell books, media, and consumer electronics.

Other Indian online retailers on scaled up marketplace model are Snapdeal(which recently raised $ 50 mn from ebay and others), Tradus, Infibeam and Shopclues. Let’s understand how the marketplace model and inventory led model compare in execution

The key components of an e-commerce set up are

  1. Customer Acquisition
  2. Catalog
  3. Technology (Customer facing/related and backend)
  4. Inventory
  5. Fulfillment (Sourcing, Packaging and Delivery)
  6. Payment Processing
  7. Customer Service/Support

Setting everything up for a rookie is quite demanding (capital and effort wise) and will take months to get off the ground, however to signup as a seller on a marketplace and/or opening a shop using SaaS based ecommerce store building platforms like Zepo, Buildabazaar or Martjack is a quickie. So for a newbie it makes perfect sense to open up their own shop (SaaS) and list on various marketplaces as a seller

Based on one’s expertise and priorities there are various ways of building the e-commerce store set up. For eg: while someone will prefer to control the last mile delivery experience, someone would rather let logistics companies take care of that.

The most common model is mix of Inventory led and Marketplace both (think Amazon). Here’s how it works

  1. Inventory Led – Short Tail (Fast moving, Commodity products, Easy to warehouse for ex: best selling books/movies/pendrives etc)
  2. Marketplace – Long Tail (Slow moving, Niche products, Difficult to warehouse for ex: medical books published in hindi/very old foreign language films/Furniture etc)

While it might not very clear from the examples but Inventory led model makes sense for products which aren’t perishable(both utility and demand/vogue), are easily available offline too and move fast enough while the Marketplace model makes sense for products which one doesn’t know exist or even if one knows they don’t have any clue on how to stock them, how to source them etc.

Customer Acquisition,Technology,Payment Processing and Customer Support are done by the e-commerce company.

Here’s how various models are implemented in some of the biggest Indian e-commerce companies.

break_up

A couple questions come to the the curious mind.

  1. Why sudden rush towards Marketplace all across?
  2. Is Marketplace the future of e-commerce in India?

1. Why sudden rush towards Marketplace all across?

The answer to that question (from what I’ve heard) lies in the deep VC pockets. With the Govt of India dillydallying around the FDI regulations for e-commerce, apparently Marketplace is the only way to get external funding needed to sustain the business.

Also, it could be because the bigger e-commerce companies have figured out that

a) they can’t possibly go that strong on increasing the  quality/quantity of the catalog on their own
b) they ran sick and tired of doing everything on their own.

To get a sense, compare how Flipkart was managing these functions in it’s previous avatar and compare it to say Snapdeal

 

break_up1

2. Is that the future of e-commerce in India?

On doing some rough calculations based on the information available Flipkart, Infibeam, Snapdeal, Jabong, Bookadda and Homeshop together would be doing around 1,15,000 orders a day (Flipkart and Snapdeal contributing about 60-70 %).

There are a lot more sites (ending with kart and otherwise) who just might be doing another (20-30,000 transactions or more a day)

As per my guesstimate all independent smaller e-commerce websites and platform powered online shops selling long tail products would be doing not more than 5-10,000 orders a day.These numbers could be significantly different from the mark for all we know but based on these numbers before marketplace became the buzzword, top 5-6 established players were doing about 90,000-95,000 orders a day in total while the others in long tail were about 5-10% of their size.

The balance has started to shift towards the marketplace model transactions. For now their share could be 10-15% of the overall e-commerce transactions.  Going forward we’ll a lot more smaller businesses and niche startups coming online and by 2013 end their share could be upwards of 20-25%(going by the fact that between Flipkart and Snapdeal they are the biggest online retailers).

A couple of factors to speed this up would be

  1. More platforms like Buildabazaar and Zepo
  2. Better payment gateway/cash collection mechanisms (Ghar pay etc)
  3. Better logistics (for end to end fulfillment)
  4. Third party SaaS services for other components like (Catalog, Warehousing, Customer Support)
  5. Some VC investment in 1-2 marketplace companies

The sooner we get to see the above mentioned things rolling the faster we’ll get to the long tail moving online. At some time in the  mid term future(5-7 years) the demand for long tail items (Niche/scarcely available/custom made) products could become comparable if not more than the demand for short tail products.

So the marketplace model and independent shops powered by various sites are here to stay and the current biggies like Flipkart, or maybe Snapdeal will evolve into a mix of (Short tail – Inventory led – Self Fulfilled and Long tail – marketplace – Logistics company) models.

Your thoughts?

Get Big Fast or Get Better Slow?

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Get Big Fast, a phrase most commonly attributed to Amazon Phenomenon of acquiring significant market share in your category in very little time but growing extremely fast. The numbers in cases such as these don’t grow linearly but exponentially. The Get Big Fast philosophy requires extreme focus on scaling operations, hiring, aggressive marketing and short product cycles. The targets set for the growth might look unreasonably high to some but that’s the only way this works, Get Big Fast and become the leader in your category before anyone else so that now your Scale also works as a Differentiator.

The other or rather opposite approach that most businesses wittingly or unwittingly end up with is what I call Get Better Slow. This happens in most startups. They have reasonable growth targets and work on a moderate or slow pace to achieve them. Part of the reason is lack of clarity or conviction about the end goal and part is the lack of firepower among other things. Interestingly the Get Better Slow option is the default for most startups and many a times without the founders realizing they approach this with the perspective of doing more groundwork, thinking deep, organic growth and what not.

While I don’t mean to say that a startup growing slowly would stay like that forever but what I really mean is that unless the founders and team consciously choose to set and attain unreasonably high growth targets, their chances of staying in the business as a significant player are quite less. To give you some context, for someone doubling the revenue in six months might be great but for someone doubling revenue in 2 months is the desperate need and unless the need is desperate, ones chances of getting there are a bit less.

Also, in many cases Get Big Fast Vs Get Better Slow turns into Growth Vs Revenue. While one startup might keep focus on revenue/monetization, the other might just do the opposite to make sure that monetization doesn’t distract them from growth. It’s actually one of most crucial decisions for a startup, a HUGE BET which in most cases doesn’t pay off well.

The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to like the Get Big Fast philosophy which involves stretching out to the hilt, tons of small and big experiments and very short learning cycles. On the contrary the Get Better Slow philosophy which appears to be grounded on the thought of making a sustainable, quality/customer centric business actually hurts the startups more because of the comparatively slower iteration cycles which in most cases lead to losing traction or a considerable part of the market to competitors who manage to Get Big Fast, which effectively means that tough you think you are doing a great job for your customers but your customer set is so small that it doesn’t change much in the bigger scheme of things

Get Better Slow:  Get Big Fast:: Passion: Obsession

What do you think?

Cash on Delivery(COD): The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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COD or Cash on Delivery as we now know it wasn’t no where near its popularity today a few years back. Today quite a few people (who call us at dialabook and otherwise) know and talk about Cash upon Delivery as a concept (books milne ke baad paise de sakte hain?) if not the exact term. COD as we know has taken the entire e-commerce Industry(if we can call it) by a storm.

To give you some perspective, about 2 years back when we(@dialabook) started collecting payment for books on delivery, we had no idea about this term and no notable e-commerce site had this option. Fast forward it to today and almost all e-commerce sites(and a few others like the one below) accept(or rather promote) COD to lure more customers.

While COD as a concept has been there for ages under the name VPP (Value Payable Post) by India Post. Here’s how their website defines VPP

The value payable system is designed to meet the requirements of persons who wish to pay for articles sent to them at the time of receipt of the articles or of the bills or railway receipts relating to them, and also to meet the requirements of traders and others who wish to recover, through the agency of the Post Office the value of article supplied by them.

Govt VPP however seems to have an upper limit of Rs 5000/-, which means you can’t send goods worth more than 5k through them.

Not just VPP, some courier companies in India have been supporting COD since March 2009 at least. Though some  startups like @dialabook might have been offering COD locally before, the big shift happened in April 2010 when country’s leading e-commerce player Flipkart introduced COD in April 2010 with a cash limit of Rs 2500/-, followed eight months later by Infibeam (FYI: Indiaplaza announced COD on 25th March 2010, a few days ahead of Flipkart ). It is also worth noting that some services like travelguru.com were offering COD option at least 2 years before e-commerce companies started adopting it. Seeing its success elsewhere, online travel portals yatra and Ezeego1 also launched COD in year 2011

As it turns out India isn’t the only breeding ground for COD. China,Russia etc have been a witness to the popularity of COD for long.

Going by the stats in India, as much as 60% customers of top 5 e-commerce sites in India use the option of paying by cash on delivery (COD) and many of these sites have credited COD  for fueling their rapid growth. While COD for obvious reasons makes a lot of sense for Indian customers and definitely opens a new market (students etc) to e-commerce it isn’t exactly what the doc prescribed or should prescribe. Here are some of the things wrong with COD

  1. Cost: Nearly all courier companies charge extra for collecting cash. This cost is divided in two parts
    Fixed Cost: Rs 20-150/- ;  Variable Cost: 1-3% of the COD Amount. (This is mostly for high price items like mobile phones, laptops etc). If the item is priced low then the COD charges at times exceed one’s margin in the product and if the item is priced very high then the % COD charge turns out to be in hundreds or even thousands
  2. Delay in payment: Unlike credit card transactions, COD payment generally takes 1-2 weeks or more to be transferred to your account. This bites your cash flow especially as the COD amounts start becoming huge.
  3. Delay in deliveries: On an average COD deliveries are delayed by 12-36 hours when compared to normal deliveries. The reasons for the same are mostly non-availability of customer or cash and many a times both. Here unlike regular deliveries the parcel can’t be dropped to a neighbors place
  4. Higher Returns/Cancellations: Since the customer hasn’t paid in advance, they can always cancel/refuse to take the delivery and sight reasons like I found this phone cheaper locally and have bought it from there or I have changed my mind, will buy a new laptop later
  5. Overheads: Collecting the cash, collating the receipts and maintaining records et all is a nightmare

With increasingly every online business offering it despite its disadvantages(to retailers) the situation might just go out of hand and turn into a death spiral (at least for some non/less funded businesses that rely heavily on their internal cash flows). Small startups are the ones that should be really concerned about these issues instead of blindly aping others and starting COD.

With time as the e-commerce market in India matures, there *might* be more trust in established mechanisms of swiping cards for paying and some people will get over the liking for COD and prefer pre-payments. But, given the case in China, Russia etc it looks like unless the e-commerce majors deliberately start demoting COD and promoting other payment options we just might replicate what’s happening elsewhere i.e 60-85% people using e-commerce sites paying by COD.

Some ways around COD

  1. Multiple Payment Options (at least 5-6)
  2. Pre-payment methods (like wallets, cards)
  3. Mobile banking and SMS payments
  4. Card on Delivery
  5. Giving incentives to users for choosing online payment against COD
  6. Alternative payment methods such as paypal etc

While COD is a good option to have in some cases its double edged sword which should be used with a lot of caution and foresight. What do you think?

Bookselling in the Time of VC $$

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I’ve been wanting to write this post for quite a while now, glad this long weekend gave me enough time to finally sit on it.

A lot has changed since I started working on Dial-a-Book some 2 years or so back(then part time though). Back in Q4 – 2009 e-commerce was quite nascent and VC funding for it was not even half as common as it is today. There were just 2-3 online bookstore or e-commerce sites that looked like they could go anywhere and every week a new online bookstore was being launched. Indiaplaza was probably the most popular one.

All these existing and upcoming online bookstores were pretty much doing the same things, building a half decent website, listing a lakh odd books and giving heavy discounts in hopes of wooing the online audience. Two years into it, a couple of the popular sites at that time have grown enormously, another couple new sites have emerged and attained very good scale  and almost all the remaining ones have either shut down or are doing just well enough to sustain the owners.

I’ve always been a price conscious book buyer with likings but hardly any loyalty to a bookstore.  I remember when i first discovered Midlands who offered me 20% discount on all books how I moved almost all(leaving a few impulse buys here and there) my book purchases to  them. Kinda same thing happened when I discovered the desi online stores, the fact that they offered even more discounts and could home deliver(for free) almost any book in a few days time was a good enough reason for me to move all my book shopping( a few books/month on average) to them.

Back then I was one of the only few people in my circle to buy books online and almost none of my friends/colleagues had much clue about the online book buying scene. The booksellers on the whole turned out to be surprisingly unaware of the developments in the e-commerce(mostly book selling) space.  They hardly had any idea about online bookstores and those who did were quite dismissive of them by saying ‘Such things work in the US not in India, here people want to touch and feel before buying’, ‘These online sites give too much discounts, they can’t last long’.

Circa 2011,  the same bookseller is now offering a recently released book by Amish Tripathi at 1/3rd discount, which is just 3 Rs more than the price (Rs 192) at which it is being sold at most online bookstores.

So what changed? More importantly, what led this change?

Q 1. What Changed?
A 1. The Market Dynamics  

1) More for Less 



Giving a 33.33 % discount on a newly released book would have been unthinkable for any bookstore, especially the ones which sells 200+ copies of each new release every month with a standard discount.  But now the whole game has changed, today’s reader is exposed(and addicted) to heavy discounts, highly efficient and user friendly customer experience and the only way to survive is to offer competitive pricing coupled with widest possible range and great overall experience. Gone are the days when the booksellers used to decide which books to import/stock, how to price them and to procure locally available books on customer request (if at all) and take a week for it.

Every search on twitter(for a big online store) would reveal at least a couple tweets mentioning how people now browse books at landmark/crossword and buy them online. You can see the shift happening right there.

2) Let’s Get Online

Seeing the stellar growth of some of the famous online stores a few bookstore chains also woke up from slumber and started developing and promoting their online stores. Landmark, Crossword, Odyssey et all now have online stores where they claim to offer hugh discounts  (interestingly on some books the discounts are even even more than anywhere else)

Not just this, even the smaller chains(like Sapna, oxford) and individual bookstores are online and spending money on google ads and social media to promote themselves.

Apart from these there are some publishers (like Pearson) and some distributors(like Prakash) who couldn’t resist the temptation of taking a shot and online bookselling and thus too have jumped the bandwagon and are doing their best to well, give more discounts.

Going further all the e-commerce stores which were focusing on other categories (mobiles etc) also have started adding books to their product list. In news recently was Homeshop18’s acquisition of Coinjoos

That’s not it, the grapewine has it that still more companies from different sectors dazzled by the million and billion dollar valuations of popular Indian e-commerce stores are planning to take the plunge and well start another online bookstore

3) Better Support

Thanks to the success of round 2 of e-commerce especially for books a lot has improved on the backend i.e at the end of publishers and distributors. Lots of processes have been initiated and followed regularly at the vendors end. Most distributors now stock their data and share stock reports bi weekly/weekly, publishers regularly share information about new and upcoming releases. Most of these guys are no better than sloppy govt officials who take enormous time and effort to do things but in order to survive some of them have learned to be better organized and efficient.

Q 2. What Led To The Change?
A 2. Lofty Ambitions Backed By VC $’s

A quick look at the new release section of most online book stores will put many a booksellers into depression. A new release on an average is on a 30% discount and depending on the hype surrounding it, publisher and competition it could go up to 50 % (Yes, that’s the cost which even the publishers might not give to their distributors but if you are luck that’s what a new release could cost you with free home delivery).

The logic championed first by Amazon (and thus replicated ad infinitum) is, give heavy discounts on new books to get more eyeballs/buzz and bigger volumes thus better topline and better pricing from suppliers.  Repeat.

You don’t expect a regular customer to understand(or bother with) all this but seeing massive discounts on the online portals make them feel that there’s a huge margin in books and as if all this while their neighborhood/favourite bookstore chain was ripping them of by not giving as much discounts.

For a customer who has bought a book at 30-40% discount will hardly ever buy a book at 10% or no discount at all

Though as a customer this would have been a dream come true for me but being on the other side of the business I too am surprised at how its working for some sites. You can now order a 95 Rs chetan bhagat book for Rs 57-60, make it two books and its free home delivery and the book is home delivered in 1-2 working days via class A courier (Bluedart if you are lucky).  It doesn’t leave much to imagination that no one, even the publisher can possibly make any money in these transactions.

A lot of small booksellers ask me “How can online sites give this much discounts when the big distributors themselves don’t get as much discount from the publishers?”

The answer more often that not lies in the fact that most sites are not focusing on making money on these transactions here but on just getting more customers. With  millions of $’s in VC funding the formula is simple

  1. Position yourself as the cheapest place to buy stuff online.
  2. Buy a lot of online ad inventory from Google/Yahoo et all
  3. Point these ads to a web page on your site which list books at ridiculously low prices

However in all this merry making of deep discounted prices there’s a catch.

For every 5 or 10 super cheap transactions there’s 1 transaction on most popular online bookstore in which the customer ends up paying price more than the its price on a bookstore of at times even worse paying more than the MRP/MRP for Indian Market.

‘The Goddess In India: The Five Faces Of The Eternal Feminine’ by Devdutt Pattnaik (ISBN: 9780892818075) is one such title. I personally bought a few copies with Rs 395/- sticker on them and on checking online the same book (picked from the same source because I can compare the delivery time on the site) being sold for almost 4 times the price.
A possible trick here could be: Stock a few copies as per the local market MRP of book which is scarcely  available, once the copies at suppliers run out, sell them at international market MRP and deliver them in 2-5 days (because its in your stock).

Such cases are more common in categories other than general books/novels, especially where chances of price comparison are less. This is clearly a minority case

This is kinda similar to what a popular bookstore in Delhi does with their super discounted sales. Buy books as per local market MRP(which is easily half or less than the international market MRP) and then sell it on the MRP pretending it to be on heavy discounts . Ex: A book with local MRP of Rs 350 is being tauted as being for Rs 1200 and after 70 % discount it comes to be for Rs 350/-. So the customer ends up paying the local market MRP (no discount at all) but might think he saved 70 % and got a great deal

Going online one can leverage efficiencies like just in time inventory, virtually unlimited list of products, pre-orders etc which in itself offers a significant advantage over traditional bookstores but selling books with -ve margins, plastering the internet(or TV) with your ads is something that cannot be competed against.

I’ve heard of some booksellers and publishers taking up this issue of excessive discounting with online bookstores and they apparently have made some progress like this popular publisher of general books has told one big online store to not offer more than 35% discount on their new releases. For every big publisher that is able to get their concern heard and acted upon there are five smaller publishers that are given a choice to shut up completely or face de-listing from the site all together.

Having said all this I feel the time has arrived for every bookseller to re-think their way of doing business and figure out how are they going to sustain themselves in these times where their much bigger and deep pocketed competitors are willing to do anything that it takes to own more customers.

And if you are beginning to start an online bookstore(e-commerce store if you will), you better have a really well thought out execution and funding plan.