Large e-com firms will follow us: Punit Soni & Peeyush Ranjan

Interview with Chief product officer & chief technology officer and head (engineering), Flipkart

In line with the trend of building technology solutions to improve the shopping experience, top e-commerce portal Flipkart has launched a chat feature within its application to help consumers with their buying decisions, especially since 70 per cent of its traffic is coming through mobile. In an interview with Surabhi Agarwal, chief product officer Punit Soni, and chief technology officer and head (engineering) Peeyush Ranjan spell out their future roadmap. Edited excerpts:

What is the big idea behind e-commerce companies focusing so much on technology?

Soni: Most companies are increasingly becoming technology companies. In automobiles, Tesla has taken off. Social media has become an identity metaphor. Google has actually become an infrastructure problem solver. So, product and technology is actually just how you scale to serve billions of consumers. You can solve serious infrastructure issues, deep operational problems only through product and services. It is practically impossible to solve them any other way.

What is the thought behind putting all efforts into mobile?

Soni: What is the big deal with mobile simplicity? I always turn it around and ask what do we do? We are in an ecosystem where last year, 20 per cent of all Flipkart users browsed through mobile and today, we are at 70 per cent. Today, 90 per cent of all your internet traffic is through mobile. Indian consumers have decided and we have to act accordingly. If we don't, we will miss the boat. This ecosystem of huge overwhelming mobile internet penetration, a large number of users coming online and the e-commerce scale that we have, allows us this large and wonderful opportunity to reinvent what shopping means for the entire world. Nobody has this ecosystem except for India. Hence, we are working on Ping, image search and five other features. It will not only change the definition of e-commerce in the country, you can expect large e-commerce companies across the world to follow us.

Can you talk about the other technology features in the offing and explain the direction in which the company is working?

Soni: We believe 90 per cent of the users will use a phone and never ever see a laptop. What does the phone has, it has a camera, a mike; it can listen, so it has pseudo ears. It can connect to the cloud, so it has augmented brain. So, first there will be a collection of features that will be built around that. Image search is one, and then we will think about how all the other sensors can be built around that. The second category of features is around social. The idea is that people are interconnected to you. And Ping is just a baby step in this direction. There will be a whole host of features around that. And the third is deep infrastructure issues in India, which Peeyush can talk more about. For instance, 2G network is flaky, checkouts drop off, and there is very low memory in phones. That can't be solved with infrastructure alone, we have to build tech for that.

Ranjan: If it (Ping chat feature) was done elsewhere and you were to bring it to India, it would not be trivial to give the same level of experience across the diverse population as people carry different phones, are on different networks etc. So, a lot of engineering has gone into it to make it seamless and reliable. Also, you are able to use your phone faster compared to what world class battery life is and what world class speed is. Because we not only solved this problem, we raised the overall bar. The way any messaging app works is that the phone keeps talking back to the cloud to check — do I have a message, that uses battery and that uses network. So, we looked at how it is done, we were able to break it down into two and reduce it to one-sixth of its weight. It is only when you have a message, you use the full-fledged system.