E-commerce Companies Need Customer Orientation, Not Aggression

After we did the story on the second coming of e-commerce earlier this year, in which we ranked the top 20 hottest e-commerce start-ups, there has not been a single week without some query or request from researchers, players and other stakeholders about the research and our next big story on the area. That has given us the impetus to keep researching and covering the area.

While the rise of e-commerce is for real, and I still hold on to my optimism about the opportunity, it is a little worrying to see many new playerssome of them promising and fairly successful so farcommitting the same mistakes that many did in other new opportunity areas such as BPO. That is believing that hype and aggression can make up for the gaps in business models.

I describe here one days experience of mine that can tell you a lot about the basic gaps that exist in the system. I wanted to buy a lower mid-range mobile phone for someone. My credit card company has tie-ups with a few e-commerce sites wherein you get additional discounts. I wanted to try it out. And went to the first one which promised to give a discount of Rs 500 if your purchase is more than Rs 2,000. I tried that out. While it did accept the gift coupon code and it showed the discounted price, the moment I went to pay, the amount that was being asked was the original amount. After trying a few times, with all possible paths, including going to the site following a link from the credit companys site, I finally gave up on that site. And this is one of the biggest e-commerce portals in India.

I went to another, which promised 10% discount. It worked fine but the moment one got into the payment page, it showed an error that we cannot complete your transaction. I kept trying a few times and then gave up. This site is one of Indias oldest e-commerce portals. Undeterred, I tried with a third site, which deals only with electronics. This promised 7% discount. I managed to get the discounted price but the site picked up the credit card billing address as the default shipping address and there is no way that I could change it. As the card was mine but this phone was to sent to someone else, in a short time, I had to back out from there. I still had one more choice left to get discount. And by that time, the discount had become secondary and my desire to explore had become much stronger. The site is one of the most hyped new generation discount sites and I thought at least it would work there. But that too was wishful thinking, as for the fourth time, I could not complete the transaction as I got the message that the discount coupon does not apply to certain categories. And the product I was trying to buy was not in the listed categories that the site did not allow discount coupons in. But that did not stop the site from denying the discount.

In three of the above cases, the customer was taken for a ride and in the fourth (in the electronics only site), it was a major gap. All these sites are some of the biggest e-commerce companies in India and aggressively market themselves. Yet, within 2 hours, I got a feel for what they stand for.

I have not named the companies here because the objective of this piece is not to single out a few companies. As some of the largest companies in Indian e-commerce, they are representatives of the industry.

Hype and marketing have their own place in business. But in the Facebook, Twitter and Mouthshut era, they cannot compensate for utter lack of customer orientation.