Repeating the events of last year and showcasing their petty rivalry once again, Snapdeal founder Kunal Bahl and Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal had a verbal spat of words over investment giant Alibaba’s proposal to enter India directly.
Sachin Bansal tweeted saying, “Alibaba deciding to start operations directly shows how badly their Indian investments have done so far" to which Kunal tweeted saying “Didn't Morgan Stanley just flush 5bn worth market cap in Flipkart down the (toilet emoji)? Focus on ur business not commentary :)”
All humor and immaturity in washing dirty linen in public aside, the Tweets exchanged do highlight some valid points. Both arch rivals working in exactly the same industry already share a common ground of complains and have several issues that can be addressed. There is a lot of room for improvement and instead of focusing on taking jabs at each other, here are a few fields where technologically both giants can grow and mature at:
Feedback addressable
Judge not by the homepage or second newspaper page giant billion rupee sales, but judge their Twitter account for customer complains. Both Snapdeal and Flipkart are filled with amusing, disappointed and even abusive customer feedback tweets aksing them to respond to their complains of poor service ASAP. The same applies to their Facebook page. Such high volume of complains which allegedly have been not addressed since weeks do not show a positive sign to anyone.
Giving competitive prices
The USP of shopping online has always been the lieu of getting great deals and discounts online, even more than saving you from the trouble of shopping outside form retail stores. This charm ahs been reduced over time because now companies just want to ajck up their sales numbers to get more funding rather than provide sustained discounts. Why are initial discounts much heavier than those given to regular customers?
Drone deliveries
It’s the year of drone deliveries and autobot deliveries, but yet Indian e-commerce giants are still delivering bricks and soap bars instead of iPhones. This kind of pathetic delivery assurance removes trust from e-commerce vendors completely and needs to bring about the amazing technology currently launched in the market.
Hyperlocal and bulk deliveries
It’s about the hyperlocal delivery system we keep reading everyday is actually launched already. This would enable deliveries in a few hours rather than days and it’s about time the plans from from paper to real life. Also, shouldn’t we be offering brilliant discounts on bulk orders and beginning to try to replace wholesale purchase completely?
Focus on lighter web pages not just app centric stuff
In this rapid race to receive funding saying “we’ve got a million downloads” all e-commerce giants have forgotten how frustrating it is for the average Indian still stuck on his embarrassingly slow internet connection trying load hundreds of product images. Research should focus on trying new web compression algorithms and new image formats that reduce a webpage’s size significantly. This will encourage users to surf more and order more.
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