eCommerce in India - A blog by Darpan Munjal

The stakes are getting high in the eCommerce space in India. As more and more online retailers enter the market, they are driving up the cost of customer acquisition. Although this level of entry in the eCommerce market is good from a long term perspective, the challenge is that most entrepreneurs don’t have the resources or capital to wait for years before they can see some signs of profitability. The good news is that there are still some business models out there, which are mostly untapped. If you execute these well, you can not only create uncontested market space, you can make it difficult for others to compete in the game. These ideas do require some innovation –however, I am not talking about a significant technological innovation – I am talking about innovation in service offerings that can help you leap outside the traditional industry boundaries. I have written most of my articles around B2C opportunities, in this article I will focus primarily on the B2B opportunities within the online space in India.

So what are some of these ideas? Well, before discussing the specific ideas, I want to start with some of the key traits of these business models. Most of the ideas that I will discuss have one common theme – low cost of initial acquisition and high switching costs. These ideas involve offering innovative, easy to plug-in, value added services to online retailers at such a low price point that retailers have no reason to look any further. So what does one gain by this charitable gesture, you ask? Well, the key is to cut so deep into the core business processes of the online retailers, that it becomes progressively difficult for them to switch to a different provider over time.

Nothing better than starting with an example – so here goes. Power Reviews is a service provider which provides technology to online retailers in US to capture and display customer/product reviews on the site. It goes one step beyond the traditional customer reviews, and offers unique capabilities to aggregate the ratings across multiple product dimensions. The great thing about Power Reviews is that it is can be fully integrated into a website within few days. Even better, the entire offering is available for no cost to online retailers! So what is the catch, you ask? Power Reviews also maintains another online property called Buzzillions.com. The only thing they ask online retailers in return for their sophisticated Reviews technology is that the reviews collected on the retailer’s web site are syndicated and aggregated on the Buzzillions website. This is a great model – on one hand, Power Reviews is offering a significant value to the online retailers, and on the other hand, they are building a great destination site for customers with aggregated reviews from all participating retailers – a win/win scenario for power reviews, online retailers and the end customers.

Internet technology is moving more and more towards a widget based, plug and play based approach and niches are being carved out from various aspects of online shopping experience. There is no reason for online retailers to build all capabilities from scratch – instead, Continue reading »

I am not a big fan of Office 2007 interface, but I love its blogging capabilities. I can just write a normal word document and then directly post it to my Wordpress account - with one click of a button. It is even cooler than the “One Click checkout” at Amazon! This had been working great for me - until now, that is! I accidentally published a draft post that had nothing more than some of my random thoughts.  Anyway, if you are subscribed to an offline reader such as Google Reader, that post was most likely pushed to you and you were probably wondering what that was all about. Well, now you know!  It was an accident. My Apologies.

I will be posting another article, hopefully this weekend, that features some of the opportunities and thoughts in eCommerce services/ platform space.

Darpan