eCommerce in India - A blog by Darpan Munjal

US based online shoes retailer Zappos.com was mentioned in this story that it has reached 6 million paying customers.  Although this is a major accomplishment, what is even more amazing is the fact that three fourth of shoppers who make purchase on Zappos.com are repeat customers. This got me thinking – how many retailers use “repeat customers” as the metric to measure success. Most of the online retailers that I am aware of think of Revenue or Gross Profit or EBITDA or net-profit as a proxy for measuring success. These metrics are certainly better than the dot com days in 2000 when online businesses were happy with just measuring the online visits – primarily because they didn’t have any real sales to report on anyways. However, are these metrics telling anything about how the customer’s purchase experience has been on the site? I would argue that these metrics are lagging indicators of performance. In other words Continue reading �

So you have built a decent looking eCommerce website, pumped up the marketing spend and you are getting good amount of visitors on the site. However, you are facing a problem that most of the newer online retailers face initially – your conversion rate is extremely low. You are baffled why majority of the visitors are not purchasing anything on the site and you ask your head of marketing to look for the answers. Although having a good marketing plan and execution is necessary in bringing visitors to your site, a lot of times, the answer lies within how your website is designed. Here are the top 10 blunders in eCommerce design that can cause the conversion rate to go south -

Blunder #10: No “About Us” page or privacy policy

Educated consumers look for certain things on a site they might do business with. Are there privacy polices? Do they have a return or exchange policy? How about shipping costs and timelines, are they posted? Are there any real sounding testimonials and pictures of the warehouse or sellers that let me get an idea that this company is for real, especially when dealing with newer online only retailers? Although it is reasonable to assume that most people don’t read such things as the policies and the like. But the fact that they are there builds confidence in the customer, that yours is a serious business.

Blunder #9: Where is the price?

Nothing irritates a visitor more than to read all the excellent product description and sales copy, only to read it all and still have to ask the most important question… how much is it ? Continue reading �

Last week I flew back to Chicago from Delhi and although I cant really say that I enjoyed any part of that 14 hours + flight, I did get a lot of time to think about the cultural differences between American and Indian consumers. For retailer to be successful in India, it is important to take into account these differences and customize the offerings to better meet the motivations and preferences of the Indian customer.

First and foremost, Indian customers love to touch and feel the products before making the purchase decision. This is one of the major disadvantages for an eCommerce environment where the touch and feel aspect is almost missing from the shopping experience. Continue reading �

Having led the eCommerce team at Sears, I often reflect upon what helped us grow our online revenues from about $20 million in 1999 to almost $1 Billion in 2006? Although I do think that technology played a key role in that growth, it wasn’t the primary reason.

An incident during one of the Christmas seasons helped me answer this question. Christmas is the peak season in US for all retailers and majority of the online and B&M sales occur during this time frame. This is the time when kids hope that Santa will deliver all the toys that they wished for. The stakes are too high because one delayed shipment could mean a disappointed child who has been waiting for that toy for the entire year. So to set appropriate expectations, we added messaging on all our product pages telling the customers to place their orders before the cut off date to ensure Christmas delivery. However, few days before the Christmas Eve, our dashboards indicated that we would miss the Christmas shipment for about 300+ toy orders. We immediately formed a SWAT team and ensured that every single order was handled in a white glove fashion and shipped via overnight delivery. The team worked through the weekend to make this happen, and we certainly lost money on these orders. However we gained something really important Continue reading �

I often think about my shopping experience at an online retailer in US - Landsend.com. I purchased a shirt from this retailer using their web site. I typically do not purchase apparel online, because of concerns related to fit and quality. However, I liked the shirt and decided to purchase it. Although the purchase experience was great, the story doesn’t end here. One year later, I called them to purchase some additional clothes. At this point, I casually mentioned to the CSR that I wasn’t too happy with the quality of one of the shirts I purchased from them in the past. The CSR first apologized and then offered to send me a replacement for no additional charge. Since this incident, I have probably shopped with Lands’End atleast 8-10 times.

This incident got me thinking Continue reading �

I have been thinking for a long time to start a blog on eCommerce in India and finally decided to take the plunge. In this blog, I will be posting various topics around opportunities in eCommerce and some of the best practices that can take eCommerce in our country to the next level.

Before I begin this journey, let me introduce myself. My name is Darpan Munjal and I recently moved to India after working for about 12 years in retail industry within US. Most recently, I was the Divisional Vice President of eCommerce at Sears Holdings (a $55 Billion retailer) and my team was responsible for building some of the best in class eCommerce websites within the industry. Before joining Sears, I did eBusiness consulting within US and led the implementation of a number of high volume web sites.

My goal of building this blog is to share my experiences, learnings, successes and most importantly, the failures that were part of building one of the largest eCommerce sites in the world. I think there is a huge opportunity in India to take eCommerce to the next level and my hope is that our collective experiences, discussions and learnings on this blog will help build a community that can lead that change.