The importance of who bought and why

Online retail chains go the Amazon way in betting on customer analytics to tap more potential buyers

HomeShop18, a leading e-retailer, is in the process of building an intelligence team responsible for slicing and dicing consumer data, says founder and chief executive officer Sundeep Malhotra.

HomeShop18 is aiming to increase its sales manifold over the next few quarters. It thinks the intelligence team and the new focus on analytics would help move towards that goal. Currently, the company does 4,000 transactions a day, roughly a third of that done by the largest online retail player, Flipkart.

HomeShop is not alone in banking on analytics to move to the next level. Several e-commerce companies operating in India — Excluzen, Snapdeal, Caratlane and some others — are betting big on analytics to know their consumers better and understand their buying and spending trends. They are all trying to emulate the international model, especially that followed by the world’s largest e-commerce company, Amazon, to suggest relevant products to shoppers.

Excluzen.com, an online showroom for luxury brands and services, including travel, hotels and air charters, has also planned to develop an analytical team. Urvashi Sahay, founder & CEO, told Business Standard: “Customer profiling and analytics is a science and Excluzen is already exploring new innovations in this space, mostly in the Silicon Valley in the US.” The company is looking at technology to capture in-depth analytics, as well as people who can scientifically and logically interpret these for differentiation, Sahay said.

On investment in this space, Sahay said Excluzen was “definitely looking into developing an analytical team in the coming years.” Management is open to engaging with investors and will do whatever is needed to ensure the e-commerce company is a success, she said. Adding, “The future of e-commerce is accurate personalisation and recommendation capability”.

CaratLane, another online retailer specialising in solitaires and diamonds, says it uses analytics in a number of areas of the business. Senior vice-president Kalaivani Sadagopan said, “We leverage analytics for marketing decisions, website design, product recommendations and to guide product merchandising decisions.” For instance, analytics help the company tweak marketing investments to get better returns, she said. It also uses analytics models to evaluate the impact that various media have on consumers’ purchase decision. “If a customer receives an email newsletter, views a banner ad, clicks on a search ad and then places an order, which advertising vehicle should get credit for that sale?”

CaratLane would continue to invest in acquiring analytics tools. “We also have invested in web analytics experts. We are attempting to leverage analytics as much as possible across the organisation, to help become a data-driven organisation, with very strong understanding of customers,” Sadagopan said.

At Snapdeal.com, the entire function is in-house, said Gaurav Chhaparwal, head of analytics in the e-commerce company. “A 30-people team, comprising primarily IIT and IIM graduates, is equipped with some of the best tools in the industry to understand the customers, suppliers and the business better. With almost every decision in the company being backed by data and analysis, the team is bound to grow,” he said. Personalisation of customer experience, recommending products and deals to them, and minimising the time taken for delivery of products are among the Snapdeal’s offerings, due to its analytics capability.

Internationally, the analytics space has been active in online retail. For instance, American retail chain Walmart recently acquired an analytics firm, Kosmix, to address the online market. Kosmix developed a technology platform that filters and organises content in social networks to connect people with real-time information that matters to them. Also, soon after the Walmart move, Ebay acquired Hunch, a recommendation technology company.

The annual retail business in India is pegged at an estimated $500 billion (Rs 25 lakh crore) and roughly 0.1 per cent of this is online retail.