eRetail in India and the focus we need

eCommerce and eRetail is happening in India and how so!! More and more players are entering the market and buyers have better choices of Products and Prices and all from the comfort of their home & offices. Everything from shoes to clothes to handicraft items to discounts for spas and salons, is now just a click away for the Internet Savvy buyers in India. Consider this

•  According to a study titled ‘Indian Footwear Industry: An Analysis’ released by The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM),  the Indian footwear industry is currently pegged at Rs 22,000 crore and online shoe shopping currently accounts for about eight per cent of the overall industry. This roughly stands at Rs 1,760 crore.
• According to the August 2011 report “The Checkout International: Indian Shoppers” from The Integer Group, a retail branding agency with offices worldwide, 42% of consumers in urban India had purchased travel-related tickets online, while another 33% would consider doing so in the future.
• eMarketer estimates that the number of online buyers in India will reach 21.5 million in 2012, driving $14.2 billion in business-to-consumer (B2C) eCommerce sales, including travel, for the year. Retail eCommerce, which excludes travel, will reach $2.4 billion. Travel will continue to account for the majority of online sales through 2015, but as online retailers improve services and selection, online buyers will look to the web for a wider variety of products and better prices.

The eshops are there, so are the window shoppers and the buyers. They are coming not only from the Metros and mini metros but also from smaller towns and cities. Some of these ventures are self funded -till now, and some are VC backed.

What they all need now are more customers - of the buying kind, to expand sales, increase product portfolio and make some real money (not only valuations). So why is this all taking time? And how much time will it take to see some of these ventures get handsome returns and make genuine long term profits? How do we increase sales and grow the business?

While external factors such as the state of the country's economy, inflation, Rupee value vis a vis the Dollar, etc etc...  will effect these businesses like they do to all businesses, for the ecommerce / eRetail ventures there is only one way to go for quite some time to come and that's up and up. Look at US and Europe and while retail sales are growing marginally what is still growing is eRetail.

And that's bound to happen as in tough time people are looking to make smarter buying choices and nothing better than the Internet for that. Not only are things cheaper on eRetail (due to reduced expenditure on Middle men and shop floor rentals and manpower etc etc) there is also a better choice of products & vendors to choose from.

In India we are just starting to experience the benefits of eRetail, both buyers and sellers that is. So we have a long way to go but how fast we can grow the eRetail business depends a lot on us. What do we need to do? Well from my experience of over 23 years,the last 15 or so of these being in the Internet space, there is one things that's most important that people and organisations tend to forget to focus on. And that is - The Customer.

Yes - The Customer. We tend to forget focussing on the Customer. Easier said than done? Well let me make it a 4 point focus rather than one. We need to:

1. Define what business we are in - We may be selling Clothes or shoes or discount coupons but if that is what we think we are then growth will be slow and painful. We have to be in the business of fulfilling a need for our customer.
2. Define who are our customers - It is better to sell to a targeted audience that has a need rather than everybody and anybody as then you will burn a lot of money to get some people to buy rather than target a select few and get them to buy at a lesser cost.
3. Be where our customers are. Find out where our target audience is and then make sure we are there too.
4. Communicate benefits - For the target audience, the Customer, instead of shouting product or service benefits to one and all. What is in it for him or her? How will our product or service solve their problem or fulfill their desire?

So like I said before - The focus here has to be only on the one and most important entity  - The Customer.

All the above are nothing new. We all know it. We learnt this in business school, read books written by experts and read articles on this every day. However each one of us, when we sit at our desks every day, what we concentrate on, is doing our tasks or our job. That's it. Over the years we have been taught to do what we are told to do. Our job.  A designer is busy preparing the best design, a marketing executive is busy trying to make an award winning marketing campaign, a programmer is busy writing code to make things work, the finance person is busy saving money for the company, an HR executive is busy managing hiring and employee retaining strategies, the CRM executive is busy clocking hours and getting rid of customer queries in the shortest possible time with the best ratings and a CEO is busy managing teams in-house and externally to keep the business growing for the investors. So who is looking after the customer??? Mostly Its No One.

The programmer says - Hey the Product person tells me what features and functionalities they want and I make it. Don't look at me. The HR woman says - Hey the Management and the Employees are my customers and I am taking care of them. The marketing person says - Oh I am all about the customers that is why I just did a Market research and am creating a fundoo campaign to get more click through's and page views, the CRM person says - Am listening to customers all the time and resolving their queries, what more do you want me to do? However frankly, what is happening here is that no one is really looking after the customer from the time he or she has a need to after they have or have not  bought from you. In piece meal - yes someone from the company is actually looking at or thinking of the customer at some point in time but on the whole - No one.

But then that's true for all businesses - aren't we talking of e Retail here? Well we are. In the Internet & New Media space this - Customer focus becomes even more important than anywhere else. And that's because here all the 4P's of marketing are the medium itself or a part of the medium. Here we can track, measure, interact at every step, here we can correct on the go, here we can change strategy on the fly, here we can test and then apply,  and most importantly here the customer needs us much more than in the physical store front. S/he has no face to see, turn to or trust. They come by their choice, for their need and the need to make a decision for themselves.  If we are not attentive or don't make it easy and intuitive for them ... well they will go... and Buy from someone else.

In the eRetail or ecommerce space we need everyone to be a marketer - be it the programmer, the product person, the CRM person, the designer, or anyone else in the company and everyone has to be constantly thinking .... How will what I am doing benefit the customer. Everyone in the organisation needs to think like a customer and work with the single minded goal of making things simple and easy for the customer. This way we will have

• The marketing person concentrate on creating campaigns that will drive the right kind of              customers to the website because they will know who their target audience is and create a campaign that will not only drive traffic but also lead to sales.
• The Product, engineering and design team make customer friendly and intuitive websites that will help a customer find the product and buy it in the shortest possible time.
• The CRM team will make the buying process simpler and also encourage repeat buying by           hand holding a customer or a potential customer and help them buy instead of just solve queries.
• The finance team will make the payment and billing and refunds etc so simple and hassle free that every customer will want to come back the next time again.
• And same for everyone else in the organisation.

Ideal Situation and hence impossible to do some will say. Well sounds ideal but not too difficult to do actually. Is it so difficult to inculcate a culture of customer centric approach? Is it difficult to share statistics and data with all teams and show them how what each one of them did impacted the customer experience. A better design leading to faster load times or easy navigability leading to increased page views, a simpler checkout, a faster returns process or refund and how it all impacted sales and businesses???

It is definitely doable and specially so in the Internet and New Media space and all it requires is a culture of customer focus. So let's not make email campaigns that target everybody but no body and that sell everything to everyone. Let's not take a potential customer to a stop page and make them enter their email id even before they have landed on your page. Let's not make generic drab multiproduct landing pages on the website that make them click again to go to the product or service they came for, and then let's not make the customer click again and again to read more about the product and service and then to buy. Let's not open so many pages that they do not remember what they came for. Let's not make the registration pages so long and tedious that they run away on seeing the number of fields there. Let's not count only clicks, page views, sales and returns but let's count satisfied customers. And they will buy and come again and again and yet again. They will talk, tweet & like it and you will get more customers who will then come again and again and again and........