Sachin Bansal, CEO and one of the co-founders of Flipkart (the other being Binny Bansal), is an ardent believer in the merits of customer service. “A simple desire to create a tailor-made product for the Indian consumer has grown into something beyond what we imagined,” Sachin muses. A quick glance at Flipkart's timeline shows it was to start as a price comparison platform, but there weren't enough e-commerce sites to compare. So, both the Bansals thought, “why not start an e-commerce site?” That was the genesis of Flipkart. From an initial investment of $8,000, this humble seed of desire has germinated into a $100 million e-retailing favourite.
Like a typical entrepreneur, Sachin opines innovation is the key to the company's success. Extending services like cash-on-delivery and credit card payment at doorstep were introduced to provide ample choice and comfort to customers. Sachin says "We are one of the pioneers of the card/cash-on-delivery model in Indian e-commerce. We introduced it in 2010 as a way of countering consumers' concerns on the security of online shopping. It was convenient for customers who don't have cards (or don't want to use them) to shop with us and helped us increase our reach. With respect to CoD, we have faced no issues in terms of returns or payment and this is also due to the fact that we handle a large part of our orders through our own delivery system. Today, almost 65% of our total orders are based on CoD and as our business grows, we see the number of orders on CoD going up.
Flipkart also drives innovation through intelligent use of IT - By using a system that allows Flipkart's engineers to launch multiple versions of its website in real time, IT drives a new level of innovation. Amod Malviya, VP Engineering, Flipkart, says "We had to be careful to not let our rapid growth kill the innovative spirit of the company," he says. That's a valid fear. In the business of innovation, complacency holds no ground.
Malviya knew he would have to empower users with new tools to innovate and stay ahead of the pack. But creating a new process wasn't the solution. "Processes force people to do things in a certain way, killing their creativity. If you remove the bureaucratic headache, people are encouraged to think freely," says Malviya.
While he admits that this approach opens new doors to risk, he knows that it also encourages a fearless culture of innovation--a must-have in the e-commerce business.
With that goal in mind, Malviya implemented a framework. The framework has two components: One measures the performance of the website through various defined metrics. The second, more interesting one, uses an A/B framework (used to test the success of web marketing campaigns), allows multiple versions of the site to be live simultaneously. This helps the company conduct live experiments by siphoning off a small portion of the traffic and studying the results.
Both components work in tandem. The metrics tool is a dashboard that measures the website's performance on various parameters. For example, if the transaction rate falls below a certain limit, systems are immediately alerted.
With the A/B component, Flipkart's engineers can also rapidly implement their ideas. "When someone proposes a new idea, a lot of precious time is spent debating what-if scenarios. Now, we can implement an idea, while mitigating its risks."
For example, whenever an engineer wants to change the design of the homepage, the A/B framework redirects 10 percent of Flipkart's traffic to the new design. They can evaluate the impact of the change with the metrics collection tool. If it leads to a dip in sales, they can immediately roll it back, and less than 10 percent of traffic is impacted.
"We started streaming metrics on large screens on the engineering floor so that engineers could track performance in real time--unlike most websites that review their performance only once in a week or a month," says Malviya.
Says Binny, Flipkart's COO, "Maintaining our quality and services while the business scales up is our biggest challenge. We want Flipkart to become India's largest and most convenient e-commerce destination. “We will close 2011-2012 with over $100 million in revenue. By 2015, we want to clock in $1billion, but looking at present trends, we may be able to do it sooner.”
Uncovering India's online avatar is a fascinating process. Only those companies that can successfully engage customers through novel ideas, quality products and seamless services will flourish. May be it is sheer genius, or simple common sense, that Flipkart has been able to accomplish all this during its formative years.
Summing up the Flipkart experience, Abhishek Asthana, a marketing student from Pune, has dedicated an ode to the portal. He tweaks the famous MasterCard campaign to sound something like “There are some things you can't buy online… For everything else, there's Flipkart!”