Varun Jain, The Economic Times
New Delhi, 15 May 2015

Akshay Sahi, customer experience head at Amazon India, too, said, "We believe that as a consumer-obsessed company, we have to enable our customers to shop anytime, anywhere, and anyway they want."

Myntra, the country’s largest fashion retail portal, closed down its website on Friday and moved to a mobile-only platform. Its parent, Flipkart, plans to follow suit within a year.

The move is driven by rapidly increasing traffic from smartphones. Another argument is that focusing entirely on the mobile app will help an e-commerce player give customers a better shopping experience.

With the increasing penetration of smartphones, the number of mobile Internet users in India is expected to reach 213 million by next month, up from 173 million in December, according to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research firm IMRB International.

Experts ET spoke to, however, are not convinced about the strategy of going app-only.

Devangshu Dutta, chief executive of retail consultancy firm Third Eyesight, said app shopping would possibly prevent comparative shopping, making the experience more "sticky", and could allow the site to further customise the experience based on location and phone-based data.

However, he added, a smaller number of web browsers are generating a disproportionate share of the sales, which suggests that they are bigger spenders than mobile users, so that is definitely a negative trade-off if a site goes to an app-only experience.

Ratul Ghosh, an e-commerce industry expert and an independent consultant, said, "One could argue that while it is okay to reduce or even stop the investments on PC-web, it could be foolish or even dangerous to discount it as a past that has completely ceased to exist."

He feels that many comfortable-with-PC shoppers may not be keen to shift to app. "What will happen, in my opinion, is that affiliate websites will have a party once they are the only route to the inventory on the PC-web. And we all know that’s 5-10% more expensive a sale," Ghosh said.

Amazon’s Sahi said nearly half its traffic comes through mobiles. "All of Amazon’s development and innovation is app first, and it will continue to be our flagship experience," he said, adding that, however, it will continue to operate its website.

Earlier ET has reported that fashion retail portal Jabong is also not in a hurry to opt for mobile-app only mode. "We strongly believe customers should have the choice to buy either on his smartphone or on the computer," Jabong co-founder Praveen Sinha had told ET.

(Published in The Economic Times.)

A seminar was organised on the 12th of May in Zeist (the Netherlands) on “the Opportunities & Challenges for Dutch (Semi-) Processed Food Companies in India”. Highlights of a report and other insights were presented by Devangshu Dutta, chief executive of Third Eyesight. Other entrepreneurs who also shared their experiences in India, and the Dutch agricultural counsellor, Wouter Verhey, was present at the event.

The sessions included:

• Welcome and opening remarks by Wouter Verhey, Agricultural Counselor India & Sri Lanka at the Embassy of The Netherlands in New Delhi.
• The market for processed food in India by Devangshu Dutta of Third Eyesight, India.
• Entrepreneurial challenges in the food sector in India by Peter Uyttewaal, Partner India of Larive International. The characteristics and strengths of the Dutch Food and Grocery Industry by Sekhar Lahiri of FNLI.
• Discovering the Pot of Gold in India by Sumit Saran of Future Consumer Enterprise Limited, India.

You can download a summary of the report via this link: India – Opportunities Challenges for Dutch Processed Food Companies

Devina Joshi, Business Standard
Mumbai, 11 May 2015

Interestingly, Amazon India flagged off operations in June 2013 without much marketing hullabaloo; its first marketing campaign hit the media only in April 2014, with a focus on delivery. With ‘Aur Dikhao’, the e-commerce major wishes to step out of the metro brand imagery it has come to acquire owing to its international lineage, and penetrate deeper into tier I and II towns. "We want to bring the brand to the local Indian guy who rides a bike and carries a smartphone or has internet access. That is our core audience," says Manish Kalra, director, integrated marketing, Amazon India.

For Amazon, the foundation for an emotional association with the Indian way of things was laid in the Kindle PaperWhite commercial of 2014 (incidentally, that Indian ad has been inducted in Amazon’s global campaign). The ‘Aur Dikhao’ campaign drives the ‘we understand India’ message by making use of colloquial shopping lingo. "We’re tapping into mass pop culture with this," says Raj Deepak Das, chief creative officer, Leo Burnett Group.

The company’s fervent need to be more ‘Indian’ is understandable – after all, it has been a late entrant in the booming $20 billion Indian e-commerce market which is slated to touch $300 billion and account for 2.5 per cent of the India’s GDP by 2030, according to a report released by Goldman Sachs last week. As per a Morgan Stanley report, Amazon India has a market share of 15 per cent, a distant third behind homegrown boys Flipkart (44 per cent) and Snapdeal (32 per cent).

Flipkart and Snapdeal did a decent job of advertising the compelling prices online marketplaces offer over the years – in fact, almost every e-commerce brand has propped its advertising on the planks of pricing, convenience, delivery and variety. Flipkart launched its first ad campaign centred on books in the summer of 2011, while Jabong rolled out its first TV ad attempt in 2012, emphasising the ease of transaction. Snapdeal went mainstream in the same year, with its ‘yamdude’ campaign signifying how even the God of Death cannot resist its tempting deals, and followed that up with a big bash Diwali campaign with 50 commercials featuring 28 celebrities in 2014. Snapdeal currently has Aamir Khan as its brand endorser for its latest ‘Dil ki deal’ campaign.

How does the new campaign take forward Amazon’s strategy in India? One can’t stay away from pricing in a growth-phase industry like e-commerce, after all. The current marketing agenda has been set by horizontal platforms Flipkart, Snapdeal etc, over the last two years. "During that period, practically all the players have been in a market-acquisition mode, so an outsized amount of marketing spend is focused on driving traffic to their webstores quickly, where the dominant theme is deals/discounts," points out Devangshu Dutta, chief executive at management consulting firm Third Eyesight. "So, Amazon has little choice but to follow that strategy too, even as it establishes itself in the market in other ways."

This explains the ‘Whattey Deal’ ads (for Amazon’s summer sale) running alongside the thematic ‘Aur Dikhao’ campaign currently. "Lucrative pricing is very tactical; it is almost like category hygiene and cannot be a long-term differentiator," stresses Kalra. And therefore, Amazon has decided to pitch its offering on the ‘variety’ premise for the long-term, while it continues to propagate a mix of pricing and delivery in its tactical communication. As analysts put it, only players with deep pockets can afford to do short-term tactical advertising alongside thematic brand campaigns, and Amazon qualifies on that count. The ‘Aur Dikhao’ campaign scores on the Indian insight parameter and with other attempts like being the lead sponsor for the India Fashion Week 2015 and sponsoring the IPL, Amazon India sure seems to want to ‘show more’ to the masses.

(Published in Business Standard.)

Mayu Saini, Women’s Wear Daily (WWD)

New Delhi, 11 May 2015

The future of fashion shopping in India appears all about about m-commerce.

Top fashion retailer Myntra – which was acquired by India’s biggest e-tailer Flipkart in May 2014 – on Monday said it will go mobile only beginning Friday.

"Myntra is taking the first step toward the future of fashion shopping," the company said in an e-mail to its customers.

This means that the desktop site will give way to mobile and tablets.

Industry analysts are divided about the impact, saying it will be a balance of a loss of some customers versus greater personalization, another strong trend for the immediate future of e-tail.

"We believe fashion is a very personal experience. Your sense of style, the brands you wear, the trends you choose to follow are unique to you. What inspires you to look good changes and evolves every day," the e-mail from Myntra stated, explaining the move. The e-tailer added that the mobile platform would help create the best fashion experience because it is "truly personalized and engaging."

Citing the changing curve of users, and their preference for shopping on a mobile platform, Shamik Sharma, chief technology and product officer of Myntra, said earlier this year that 90 percent of traffic came from mobile phones.

"They seem to be banking on the fact that the short-term loss of Web browser customers will be compensated by the faster growth of mobile usage, as well as from better conversion of app traffic by more clearly customizing the experience for the mobile customer based on location- and phone-based data," Devangshu Dutta, chief executive officer of management consultants Third Eyesight, told WWD. He warned that it was important to be mindful of the fact that a smaller number of Web browsers are generating a disproportionate share of the sales, perhaps skewing the figures, and that a mobile page is not always optimal for a customer to view the product, which could negatively impact conversions.

As e-commerce companies increasingly focus on customers in smaller cities – where mobile connections are the easiest and most prevalent form of Internet access – and target customers between the ages of 17 and 25, the faster, more intuitive navigation on mobile apps is becoming a stronger pull.

Last week, a study by Goldman Sachs estimated that the e-commerce market in India would account for 2.5 percent of gross domestic prod by 2030, and grow 15 times, to $300 billion, by then.

The report noted that online retailers would need to raise $20 billion over the next five years to sustain growth. Although Flipkart has been the fastest growing e-tailer in India, Amazon India, Jabong and Snapdeal have seen a slew of investments and have been growing fast in the fashion space as well.

The report noted that the "domestic online retail industry is evolving into a hyperlocal on-demand market," with the growth of affordable smartphones, improving infrastructure and a propensity to transact online.

Myntra’s move to ease out the desktop version appears geared to growing the hyperlocal segment, and a new focus on technology – last week it acquired Bengaluru based mobile app-enabling company Native5 Software Solutions Pvt Ltd.

The retail market in India was estimated at $550 billion in 2014 and is expected to double in size by 2020, according to a recent report by UBS Securities.

The merger of two giant brick-and-mortar retailers – the Future Group and Bharti Retail – last week is expected to create a $2.3 billion retail business with 570 stores, challenging both online and brick-and-mortar formats to hone their marketing plans and find niche segments.

(Published in WWD.)

Mihir Dalal, MINT
Bengaluru, 9 May 2015

Because India doesn’t allow foreign direct investment in online retail, Amazon works as a marketplace, connecting customers with third-party sellers on its platform. The company has roughly 25,000 sellers currently and is adding a few thousand sellers every month.

“The intention is to expand this (global shipping for Indian sellers) to other markets. We did a pilot first and we found that this was very attractive for sellers, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. There are areas where there’s friction for sellers such as logistics, product compliance and tax because regulation is different in different countries. We are developing a network of third parties to provide these services to sellers,” Deshpande said.

Since its launch in June 2013, Amazon India has established itself as the biggest threat to local rivals Flipkart and Snapdeal. Until now, Indian companies haven’t ventured abroad, primarily because the size of the Indian market is large. E-commerce sales may exceed $50 billion (around Rs.3.2 trillion today) by 2020 from $4.47 billion last year, financial services firm UBS said in an April report.

Currently it’s unclear if international sales will become a large business for Amazon India. Paytm, another marketplace, is also exploring ways of cross-selling with China’s Alibaba, one of whose affiliates bought a minority stake in Paytm earlier this year.

“This service will help Amazon differentiate itself from local rivals because it offers sellers access to a much larger customer base,” said Devangshu Dutta, chief executive at consulting firm Third Eyesight. “Another advantage is that when you’re selling internationally there’s no margin pressure, compared with selling in India, where competition is intense. Sellers have pricing power and flexibility, and this obviously increases profitability. For Amazon, it’ll depend on whether they can scale this business up to a meaningful level.”

US-based Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, already offers the global selling service to sellers in its international markets. Such cross-border selling accounts for about a fifth of its overall third-party sales.

Amazon India executives are working with their counterparts in the US and UK to make product recommendations to sellers and help them improve product visibility on the Amazon site. Apart from connecting merchants with third-party logistics providers, Amazon logistics services will also be available for sellers, said Deshpande.

“We think this is a huge opportunity. There are 25 million Indians outside India. And then there are other customers who want to buy stuff from India. Some of the early categories that we’ve identified are apparel, shoes, jewellery, health and beauty products, home furnishing and cricket bats, but the goal is to expand it to the full category set,” he said.

(Published in MINT.)