Adgully Exclusive | We plan to be in the minds of the customers: Indiatimes Shopping's Gautam Sinha

The e-commerce portal from the kitty of Times Internet Limited - Indiatimes Shopping, is one place to look forward to by digital shoppers. Gautam Sinha, CTO & E-commerce Head, Times Internet Ltd speaks exclusively to Adgully, sharing the strong holding categories in their market, the business highlights and the future plans.

Speaking about the size of the industry and the share of indiatimes in the competative market, Gautam said, "its a very fragmented market. There are about 8 - 10 players in the market, 4-5 horizontal players while 4-5 vertical players. Also there are a few site who are more involved in the product based serving. So in terms of the market opportunities and market size, the entire online market is currently less than a percent of the offline market". The opportunities are huge to all the players who are participating in this. While the offline market in India is growing at around 30%, the online market is growing at around, 65 %. "So in July we did a business of about 20 corers, in fact we plan to reach the mark of about 300 corers. This gives the idea of our market share. Also when one talks about market share, it is in various categories, our major being mobiles, an important category, making about 40% of our business. Some of the top brands being, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc. If we see our pricing schemes on our site, one shall know that we are priced very competitively,and to a large extent we make sure that its the best price, not only online but offline as well. So this is one category where we ought to dominate and lead the market", he said.

Mobile as one of the leading categories, sighting some other categories that shall come about as the shining stars, he said, "we are trying to develop the gifting category. It makes for about 17% of our business. We see a lot of transactions happening in this category, thus gifting is a fairly large business dimension cutting across all categories. So this is one category we would want to focus on, making it more than 17% of the market share."

Gautam believes that being a part of the renowned and trusted Times group, builds the trust to the brand Indiantimes Shopping, which is not only extremely high but important as well. It works as their USP, against competitors in the online shopping sphere. "With 11 years in the industry, being around for a while, we are not a new brand. The business that we ought to do is give a tremendous customer experience and customer value from every touch point of the customer. Be it how we package the product, price it and project it", he opined.

Talking about the launch of the new e-commerce site for NIR's, Gautam said, "the idea of the launch is to target is the second generation NRI's; people who have some knowledge about India, and want to do aspirational and fashion based shopping fron the Indian sub-continent. So the catelouges of the products that we are building are, designer labels for people who believe in fashion and the clothes that we are targeting are more event-based, for example - the occasion of marriage, sherwani's and lehenga's are more suited here". The launched has been just about a month ago, but has seen good amount of attraction in these categories.

Going forward, highlighting some of the significant investments that indiatimes shopping has made on the logistics and warehousing front, Gautam said, "over the last one year, we have started taking more and more ownership of the entire process. This means, when the order comes to us, we will have the product brought to our warehouse and ship it from our warehouse. So we know exactly what has been packaged, what the usual process is and what has been shipped. So the end - to - end experience in the supply chain is all managed by our dedicated team and not being outsourced". Elaborating ahead, he said, "we are building warehouses in about 5 - 6 cities so we can distribute our merchandises at lighting fast pace to our end consumer. We have also invested significantly in the unified interface that consist of the customer, the supplier, the contact center and the stake holders. So, if there is any transaction happening, it fully automated, it has visibility for the customer to know where the product is."

Telling Adgully about the CSAT initiative, Gautam said, "the CSAT initiative has multiple directions to it. To explain that, the customer experience starts with the quality of product. So if we serve good quality products, we shall typically have a higher product satisfaction from the consumer. So we have worked totally to branded merchandises and have the best of products that we can. So this how CSAT is seen from a product perspective". "The second aspect was from the delivery satisfaction, reducing the time gap between order placement and receiving a product. Hence product satisfaction and delivery satisfaction that we are trying to improvise on. On the management front, any customer issue is dealt with the senior management to understand the underlying issue behind it", he said.

Talking about their future plans for indiatimes shopping, "If one may see the trajectory that we are through in the last 6 months, its has doubled the transactions, doubled the revenues on Indiatimes", Gautam pointed. "This is mainly been because of our focus on customer experience and end to end management of the process. In the horizontal range, we have managed to hold about 8 million products through our website. We have initiated a pilot in Delhi, where plan to deliver the product the immediate next day of the order date in Delhi - NCR area. Also, we plan to take this pilot project to 8 other metro's in the next 60 days as well", he said. Also improvising on the supply chain, management, to the logistics and the customers, Indiatimes shopping has taken significant advancement in technology in the last one year. "We are building up on logistics and the supply chain and based on this and the technological already built, we plan to launch some vertical sites as well", said an elated Gautam.

Lastly, while signing off, a very positive Gautam said, "this is just the begining. In the next 6 - 12 months, one shall see lots of profit being made by Indiatimes shopping. We hope to be present in the customer's mind on the long run, while delivering value." | By Ankita Tanna [ankita(at)adgully.com]