All Posts in e-commerce

|In: CloudComputing|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

IBM and Pace Automation Ltd, a leading ‘Solution as a Service Company’ announced a strategic partnership to offer ‘RetailSmart‘, an end-to-end fully integrated solution that will enable local ‘Kirana’ [unorganized] stores to become ecommerce ready. Powered by IBM Cloud, the solution allows Kirana stores to deliver a convenient online shopping experience to consumers and pay safely using a convenient payment mode [irrespective of the size of the purchase].

Image Source – Cloud

According to industry reports, the current number of Kirana stores in India is pegged to be at 15 million. These stores have been facing tremendous headwinds from the organized retail & ecommerce companies. Attractive product presentations, discounts and cash back offers have led consumers to shop online while saving both time and money through these ecommerce portals. In addition, with the government’s demonetisation campaign, it is imperative for Kirana stores to go digital.

To bridge the gap, Pace Automation Ltd. has developed a unique solution, ‘RetailSmart’ on IBM cloud to digitally enable Kirana stores across the country. By implementing the solution, a Kirana store automatically becomes a part of the SmartKirana Network, hosted on IBM Cloud from Chennai data-center. The network digitally interconnects all Kirana stores in the country. Customers can easily access the network of Kirana stores in the neighborhood via smartphone app on Android available on Google Play Store or the SmartKirana web portal. Initially, the service will be available in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and National Capital Region and will be gradually expanded to other states and rural areas via network of distributors.

The solution will also give these stores an immediate access to ecosystem partners in banking, communication, insurance, payment processing and National product data repository. It enables the Kirana stores to:

  • Automate business processes like billing, stock management and accounting with increased efficiency and profitability
  • Receive online orders from customers through a web portal or smartphone app
  • Accept all credit / debit cards, mobile wallets, Aadhar enabled payments or UPI, irrespective of the value of the transaction thus making the transactions Cashless.
  • Put all transactions through the system creating transaction transparency, an integral aspect of GST compliance
  • Provide micro banking and value added services to customers generating additional revenue streams

SG Chandru, Chairman & Mentor, Pace Automation Ltd said

The objective of this project is to digitally empower Kirana stores and help them scale business by adding new revenue streams. For this we have tied up with series of partners to create a successful business ecosystem for Kirana merchants. Our target is to bring 1,50,000 local grocery stores to the network in the next three years & allow customers to order their groceries online from the nearest Kirana shop.

IBM is our technology partner that enabled us to develop and seamlessly deploy the solution on the Cloud. RetailSmart connects all the Kirana Stores across the country in its network digitally through the communication Ecosystem partner. This project is a win-win for all the stakeholders involved – Kirana stores, Manufacturers and Suppliers of goods and the end use customers.

Mukul Mathur, VP, Global Business partners and CSI, IBM India/South Asia said

We are excited about partnering with PACE in their efforts to digitize the unorganised Kirana stores and transform them into organized retail, leveraging the IBM Cloud and Cognitive solutions. IBM cloud is open by design, offering a set of tools, flexibility and agility that helps organizations of all size and developers to easily translate their innovative ideas into technical solutions and business models. This tie-up is an extension of IBM’s commitment to the ecosystem and a great example of how our joint solutions reach deep into the SME segment making the vision of Digital India real.

Powered by IBM Cloud, the solution is fully integrated end-to-end consisting of a custom -built hardware, an intuitive application software, backend / payment processing engines. A physically separated disaster recovery system ensures business continuity.  

PACE has also developed and implemented several solutions on IBM cloud across verticals for retail sector. ServeSmart is the flagship solution of PACE to automate the operations of restaurant retail business and has automated Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) operations in 2004 when they had just 90 outlets which has grown to 1800 plus outlets today.

PACE now provides ‘ServeSmart’ services to more than thirty five hundred restaurant outlets of various leading restaurants in India. PACE hosts all its solutions on an IBM-IaaS Facility at Chennai and at Singapore to provide disaster recovery and business process continuation.

SmartKirana web portal can be accessed here

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Singapore based company, Anchanto, an e-commerce logistics and selling platform has launched its flagship SaaS application SelluSeller in India. SelluSeller offers eCommerce sellers a one-stop solution to manage thousands of products, inventory, promotions, kits, invoicing & orders on various local and cross-border online marketplaces. SelluSeller has already integrated major online marketplaces like Amazon, ebay, Flipkart, Snapdeal and ShopClues in India, while already covering most of the marketplaces in South East Asia.

SelluSeller, Anchanto’s innovative SaaS offering, takes into account all pain points of modern online sellers and offers a simple yet effective solution to all of them. On the SelluSeller platform, sellers can manage prices and promotions as well as maintain a single common inventory. Sellers also get access to a multi-channel order management system and analytics that gives them a visibility of the product’s shipment status and the associated payment and accounting services. This SaaS application aggregates all local and cross-border marketplaces where sellers sell their products under one roof and easily navigates the complexity of online business.

Vaibhav Dabhade, Co-founder & CEO, Anchanto said

We realized an opportunity for us to provide a solution for the sellers to seamlessly list products and manage inventory across all channels with the ease of one single platform. With SelluSeller, sellers can now look forward to saving time, money, effort, manpower, and warehousing space and investment in their e-commerce business and taking it to hitherto unattained heights.

We are aiming to sign-up with more than 1000 merchants in India& Singapore in next three months. We are also planning to launch this application for Malaysian market soon.

At present, company boasts of helping customers integrate seamlessly onto multiple marketplaces such as Qoo10, Lazada, Zalora, Snapdeal, Flipkart, Shopclues, Amazon, and eBay to push inventory, digital contents, promotions and receive customer orders, all in real time. House of Frasers, Levis, Asos.com, L’Oréal and 3M are some of their key Channel Management customers.

Anchanto has grown rapidly in the last year and has expanded operations from Singapore to Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, India, and Vietnam. Anchanto has handled shipments, fulfilment, marketing promotions for leading brands like 3M, ASOS and House of Frasers. Its platform is integrated with leading online marketplaces in Asia such as Amazon, Zalora, Lazada, Qoo10, and last-mile delivery providers such as POSLogistic, NinjaVan and Zyllem.

About Anchanto

Anchanto is an e-commerce ecosystem, enabling and connecting all key players across the globe. Anchanto SaaS Technology and integration with ecosystem players makes online selling and e-commerce logistics simple for everyone. It was founded by Vaibhav Dabhade in June 2011 in Singapore with the vision ‘to give customers an enchanting experience’ through software platform and associated services.

With integrated technology and infrastructure in place, Anchanto delivers exceptional service, world-class fulfilment solutions, and partnerships that drive value and revenue for clients across all markets in Asia. In 2016, the company deployed e-commerce warehouse management system with huge logistic players in 9 countries in Asia. For more information, please visit Anchanto

|In: Digital|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Snapdeal announced the launch of GST Guru, a program which will include a range of initiatives to help prepare the sellers on its platform for the impending GST reforms, expected to roll out this July.

Image Source – GST

The program has been launched under the aegis of the Snapdeal Seller Training Academy which offers comprehensive training and development opportunities to sellers to derive the maximum benefit from the marketplace, as well as e-commerce overall.

Vishal Chadha, Senior Vice President, Business – Snapdeal said

The GST is one of the most wide sweeping reforms launched by the government of India in the recent times, and will deeply affect how business is conducted and reported in our country. Late last year, we realized that there is a lot of confusion, especially among MSMEs on how they will be impacted by the changed tax structure, as well as other GST related formalities. This program was therefore launched to bring expert help to our sellers, to make the transition as seamless for them as possible.

As part of the GST Guru, Snapdeal is offering sellers an exhaustive range of resources to ensure they are up to speed with impending policy changes. The GST 101 series of weekly newsletters offers information around the top areas of concern for sellers, and helps them prepare for the big shift. Likewise, a Weekly Business Digest that addresses pressing topics for sellers as and when they emerge is running special editions on GST compliance. Additionally, Snapdeal will also provide accounting and taxation advice to sellers, in collaboration with subject experts.

Besides the GST Guru, Snapdeal also provides year around hand-holding to sellers through various mediums. Unbox Success is an interactive program where sellers are encouraged to send in their queries, challenges, and successes through videos and directly upload them to a micro-site dedicated entirely to seller learning. An evidence of the high engagement with the platform is the 150+ seller videos created and shared by sellers organically in the last one month alone; wherein sellers generously shared feedback and suggestions on the recent new additions to Snapdeal’s seller support panel. The Snapdeal Seller Training Academy Youtube channel that offers information on a wide range of topics through 100+ videos relevant across seller life-cycle, receives over 2 lakh views on a monthly basis.

Snapdeal has invested deeply in building a resource rich but intuitive repository of all things Snapdeal-from the simplest of questions like how to list a product to more nuanced topics like how to interpret financial reports. Sellers can easily perform a Google like search on any query and receive the answers in a format of their choice [written FAQs/video/step by step guides], within minutes.

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

CashKaro.com, India’s largest Cashback and Coupons site today announced the results of its 2017 Valentine’s Day Survey-LOVEconomics. The national survey, which was conducted online and fielded more than 1,000 adults, revealed that 91% of the respondents preferred to shop online than offline for gifts.

The survey asked men and women about their Valentine’s Day gifting plans and revealed their spending behavior.

While it may be established in most minds that men ‘have’ to spend more on Valentine’s Day, CashKaro survey just threw all such assumptions right out the window. The main focus of the survey was to find out the spending behavior of men and woman on this love-filled occasion and it turns out both the expectations and reality of spending are quite in sync. When they asked respondents how much they would spend on their beloved this year, a majority of both men and women [56% & 53%] mentioned that they would spend anywhere between Rs 1000 – Rs 5000. Only 7% men and 8% women would shell over the Rs 10,000 mark.

To make things interesting, they asked them how much they expect their partners to spend on them and it turned out that both men and women [50% and 46%] expected their partners to spend approximately the same amount – Rs 1,000 ~ Rs 5,000 that they would spend on them. Only 5 % men and 10% women expected their love to spend over 10,000 on them.

Amazon.in, Flipkart and Ferns & Petals seems to have taken the cake when it comes to shopping online for gifts. It was closely followed by sites like Myntra, Shopclues and Nearbuy.

On the survey Swati Bhargava, Co-Founder, CashKaro.com said

The survey shows that this Valentine’s Day is all about love, and the youth want to find the perfect gift for their significant other. The survey shines the light on the ideas, behavior and gifting patterns that are expected this Valentine’s Day. The survey is also an indication that online is the most preferred channel to buy gifts or book reservations. Attractive deals and cashback offers do impact the buying behavior. From now through Valentine’s Day, we at CashKaro are also offering Extra Cashback/Rewards on Valentine’s Day gifting across partner retailers including Amazon.in, Flipkart, Tata Cliq etc.

The survey also revealed that 91% of the respondents would shop online for gifts to save time and money. To make things, even more, budget friendly, 89% of them would look for deals, coupons, and cashback when they buy gifts or book reservations at a restaurant.

It looks like both men and women are pretty much on the same page while choosing gifts for their partner. 23% men and 28% women would shop for clothing & accessories for their valentine.  Men [20%] and women [26%] both admit that a date night out for dinner at a nice restaurant is the gift they’d most like to receive. Chocolates & cakes and Jewellery were among the other preferred gifting choices.

CashKaro Valentine’s Day survey

The respondents were majorly between 18 ~ 30 years of age with 70% male participation. This mostly included residents of Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad.

It seems like there will be no lover’s squabbles this Valentine’s Day. According to this survey, everyone’s getting what they want.

 

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Snapdeal, India’s largest online marketplace reported that the deployment of its in-house hybrid cloud solution Snapdeal Cirrus, has led to a massive impact on cost and business optimization – the headline being a whopping 75% drop in its monthly infrastructure costs.

Snapdeal Cirrus is built entirely using open source platforms like Openstack with a home grown layer of infrastructure-as-code built on top of it, making it not just an industry-first in India, but also one of the largest deployments of a hybrid cloud anywhere in the world.

Since its launch in last September, Snapdeal has migrated over 300 micro-services and 200 data-stores onto Cirrus, without any downtime required. During this massive live migration, it built the capabilities to orchestrate any micro-service at will on their own private cloud or any of the public clouds like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform.

Rajiv Mangla, Chief Technology Officer, Snapdeal said

Since the launch of Snapdeal Cirrus our monthly burn on public cloud has been cut down to one-fourth. When we decided to build a hybrid solution, our infrastructure needs were growing exponentially and in a short span of 10 months we have built an extremely reliable and scalable platform, with a small but extremely talented team.

The addition of Snapdeal Cirrus to Snapdeal’s innovative technology platform, has led to massive cost savings, but has also lead to exponential performance gains across its applications, providing a consistently more reliable and frictionless experience to customers across India.

About Snapdeal

Snapdeal’s vision is to create India’s most reliable and frictionless commerce ecosystem that creates life-changing experiences for buyers and sellers. In February 2010, Kunal Bahl along with Rohit Bansal, started Snapdeal. Today Snapdeal is India’s largest online marketplace, with the widest assortment of 50 million plus products across 800 plus diverse categories from over 125,000 regional, national, and international brands and retailers. In its journey till now, Snapdeal has partnered with several global marquee investors and individuals such as SoftBank, BlackRock, Temasek, Foxconn, Alibaba, eBay Inc., Premji Invest, Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mr. Ratan Tata, among others. For further information, please visit Snapdeal

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 1 Comment

Taking skilled craftsmanship beyond the geographical boundaries of India, Handikart – an online handicraft’s store that offers assorted range of genuine handicraft products from India today announced its global selling program. The brand offers a much needed platform to Indian artisans thus giving impetus to the fragmented industry with unimaginable potential.

The brand offers a much needed platform to Indian artisans thus giving impetus to the fragmented industry with unimaginable potential.

Under its global selling program, Handikart will be delivering products worldwide, including the United States, UK, Middle East & Latin America. Handikart’s foray into international market aims to bestow the global citizens an opportunity to experience the splendid craftsmanship of Indian artisans by bringing the vast variety of exquisite handmade products under one cover.

Image Source – Handikart

Expressing his delight while announcing the global selling program, Priyank Vashney, Founder of Handikart, said

We are mighty pleased to see our diligent efforts taking shape finally. Exquisite demonstrations of India’s skilled craftsmanship have created a distinct identity to win accolades in India and worldwide. In less than six months we expanded pan India and now globally.

Handikart is in alignment with the Indian government’s Skill India campaign and going forward we shall add more categories to our splendid handmade collection and keep promoting artisans of India on the global stage.

Handcrafted products across 30 categories are available on the website from traditional local artisans. The products showcase the undying spirit of the artisans’ creativity, living in far remote areas in various parts of India.

From Gorara Stone fine carvings to Black Pottery of Nizamabad; from hand-made bone jewellery to eco-friendly bamboo and cane products from Assam; from Orissa’s Palm Pattachitra to Shikauli baskets of Uttar Pradesh, from Kashmir’s paper mache to traditional Blue Pottery of Jaipur, Handikart is a place where Indian essence comes alive.

Handikart is a team of handicraft lovers and deal in those products that are part of Indian Handicraft history for a very long time. For more information, please visit Handikart

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

While in the last two months, households across India have had to take some tough decisions. The cash problem is directing consumers to online stores where they can pay with cards or mobile wallets and buy grocery.

The days of heading to the supermarket are over as people now trade trolleys for home delivery services. New research from CashKaro, India’s Largest Cashback & Coupons site, takes a closer look at the cultural shifts in the way millennials stock their kitchen cupboards after demonetization.

Key Findings

  • BigBasket, Grofers, Godrej Nature’s Basket, ZopNow and Grocermax are the most preferred grocery sites
  • More than 50% of the respondents have started buying grocery/daily items online after demonetization
  • 44% would like to avail a subscription service for grocery, owing to their busy schedule
  • 79% have grocery applications installed in their mobile phones out of which 33% use more than one App

The online grocery industry seems to be an unintended beneficiary of the move as the customer cannot postpone essential purchases for their home. The survey indicated that more than 50% of the respondents have started buying grocery/daily items online after demonetization & a quarter would like to start soon. BigBasket, Grofers, Godrej Nature’s Basket, ZopNow and Grocermax are voted amongst top hyper-local sites. BigBasket ranks top in overall service [37%], Grofers leads in packaging [34%], Grocermax has the best prices [32%], ZopNow in delivery convenience [34%] & Godrej Nature’s Basket for fresh products [38%].

The main reason consumers cite for shopping grocery/daily items online is that it allows Cash-free transactions [31%] and offers better deals & discounts [25%]. This is followed by the fact that online shopping gives consumers more convenience than visiting stores [24%] as well as offers the luxury of delivery time slots as per own availability [10%].

Added innovations such as subscription-based service may have a significant impact on the growth in online grocery shopping, as 44% of respondents said they would like to avail this service considering their busy schedule. 79% of total respondents said they have grocery applications installed in their mobile phones out of which 33% have more than one App. However, 15% of these App buyers said they still like to order via Desktop.

On the survey Swati Bhargava, Co-Founder, CashKaro.com said

It’s very interesting to notice this changing consumer behavior towards shopping grocery. The shift from superstores/local vendors to online shopping channels is certainly visible as a lot of users have started to shop for daily items online after demonetization. The survey is also an indication that while the changing lifestyle coupled with long working hours has shifted grocery purchasing trend from offline to online format, attractive offers by grocery players are also wooing the consumers to opt for online purchases. We at CashKaro also have seen a 2X growth in the number of transactions on these sites post November 8 last year.

While the survey indicates a rise in willingness to shop grocery online, not all consumers are ditching the trip to the offline shops. 31% still feel concerned about the quality of online products, 26% are not sure about the return policy whereas 20% prefer to inspect products themselves before buying.

The survey also revealed that almost 61% respondents shop for groceries weekly and a majority of them spend between Rs 500 – 2,000 per month. The survey was conducted at a pan-India level with 53% male and 47% female participants. A majority of the participants were over 35 years of age and were employed.

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Late on November 8th 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that 86% of the notes in circulation in India-Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes-will no longer be legal tenders after midnight. The move was aimed to curb corruption and black money, primarily. Hailed as a landmark move by some and unnecessary by others, the situation had a big impact on spending pattern of the Indian consumers & the e-commerce business.

India’s #1 cashback destination CouponDunia has come up with an infographic detailing about how Indian consumers’ shopping behaviour shaped up following the demonetization announcement. The infographic highlights online shoppers’ behaviour from November 8th 2016 to January 2nd 2017, comparing it to equal number of days before the demonetization announcement- 13th September to 7th November.

It covers everything from top performing brands during the post-demonetization period to how top brands and metro cities were impacted. There are also some very interesting insights in the ‘Other Insights’ category, highlighting the surge in ordering food and medicine online and booking cabs, too.

Detailed information about the effects of Demonetization on online shopping is below: