IT drives our business: Snapdeal

Snapdeal.com's VP, Amitabh Mishra, in a conversation with Dataquest walks through his company's tech initiatives and how it has ushered in operational efficiencies. Excerpts

On the pervasive role of IT

As an e-commerce company, we our is very much dependent on technology. There are three key aspects that IT makes an impact at Snapdeal. One is the customer facing interface and the second is the vendor interface (vendors use our technology to create catalogs, update inventories and prices, terms and conditions, track their shipping orders on a daily basis, what has come and what has not). The third aspect is our internal operations in which our customer care uses our technology platform for a range of customer facing issues. Beyond that, we have the finance and other departments relying hugely on data analytics to make internal business decisions and how to interact with customers.

Do you measure your IT spends so that cost can be rationalized?

Well, cutting down costs is not a goal since we are chasing growth and constantly investing in tech. But we always look and adopt cost-effective technologies that give us more bang for the buck. Our cloud adoption is one such instance. We do look at lesser TCO and greater RoI but just for the sake of savings we do not compromise on adopting the best-of-breed solutions.

Being an online retailer how do you tackle issues of scale?

Our technology foundation is very sound. We have a fully distributed architecture and service-oriented tech platform and we are on cloud as well. So, that allows rapid scaling. Any component that requires scaling can be individually pulled out and scaled at a very short notice. Let us say, we got 20 times more traffic on our website, we can simply scale up to 20 times more capacity. Same holds true for order management system, say about 20 times traffic results in two times orders-then we just add the order management components and scale them tenably. So clearly the three key things that make scaling possible for us are cloud, distributed architecture, and service-oriented tech platform.

Any unique tech innovations in your IT?

By the end of 2011, we decided to have a full-fledged online marketplace-which means that we needed to have streamlined vendor interaction, high technology integration with vendors who want to upload content like products, images, pricing, etc. Most people have a standard format in which the vendors have to upload the information and they have to learn to do that; but we did the reverse. We developed a content management system which allowed us to take the feed in vendor specific format and vendor's delivery mode. We just configured our systems to that particular format and we take in the feed. That allows the on-boarding of the vendor faster and onloading of vendor content smoothly. Secondly, our system intelligently reconciles the vendor content and pushes it forward.

What is your tech roadmap?

We were one of the early movers to implement marketplace, but even Amazon has taken six to seven years to figure out its marketplace model right. The marketplace however is constantly changing, the customer interface needs to get easier and more appealing. Emphasis should be on how can we make the vendor interface and website more robust and strong and add scale to survive security attacks and meet logistics demands. Once you have a marketplace, you have to manage all the associated processes to be tracked using technology.

In line with that our priority is scaling the current catalog size. We are also constantly working on scaling up inventory and pricing updates-pushing all these in an hour and that too during peak traffic. Thus, a vendor could change, say many products and prices every hour if he wishes to and it is also important for the vendors to have a platform to help them see other vendors and price themselves competitively.