MxMIndia

Tag: Ankur Warikoo

  • To launch a six-part knowledge series to simplify insurance for millions

    Bharti AXA teams up with Ankur Warikoo

    By Our Staff

     

    Bharti AXA Life Insurance, a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and AXA insurance company, announced details of its new organisation purpose of simplifying insurance and providing innovative solutions to the consumers. For this it has partnered with Ankur Warikoo, co-founder of nearbuy.com, an angel investor, entrepreneur, educator, and influencer, to launch a six-part knowledge series – ‘Plan Smart With Ankur’.

     

    Through this video campaign Bharti AXA Life and Warikoo will engage, spread awareness, and educate consumers on the need, importance, and the key factors to keep in mind while selecting life insurance.

     

    Speaking on the collaboration and new video campaign Parag Raja, MD & CEO, Bharti AXA Life Insurance said: “We are living in unprecedented times. The need to be conscious and wary of our physical and financial well-being has never been more crucial than it is now. Evident through this video series we have commenced with Ankur Warikoo, making insurance simple to understand can lead to greater insurance penetration in the country. At Bharti AXA Life, we take pride in going the extra mile to understand the challenges and experiences that people face in terms of financial health and planning and believe that this association would help us drive an extensive awareness campaign on the need for insurance.”

     

  • With rise of e-commerce, deal or coupon sites such as Coupon Dunia and Groupon see revenue rising around 500%

    Deal sites make hay as e-comm rises

     

    By Payal Ganguly & Aditi Shrivastava

     

    The fierce rivalry among ecommerce sites to snag new customers through massive discounts has expectedly led to burgeoning sales at couponing sites that enable users get products and services online at a steal.

     

    With the rise of e-commerce, deal buying and couponing sites, such as Coupon Dunia, Groupon and several others, have seen revenue rise as much as 500%, most of it attributed to the bigger players – Flipkart, Amazon India and Snapdeal.

     

    In a couponing website, a customer can search for a particular discount voucher and use that code to get a discount or cashback on an etailer’s website. “I see couponing as a less exploited marketing tool as of now. Going ahead, as ecommerce grows, we will see more and more success for these sites,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail advisory firm Technopak.

     

    A majority of transactions for these portals still come from the bigger ecommerce sites like Flipkart, Amazon India, Jabong, Fashionara and MakeMyTrip, among others.

     

    “A lot of online shoppers start their shopping journey from these (couponing) sites, and we do get a healthy share of business from them,” said Darpan Munjal, co-founder of Fashionara.

     

    The couponing sites get commissions that vary across merchants and categories. For electronics, it is 2-5%. For clothing it’s between 10% and 15% or even higher. Travel sites usually pay about Rs 100-300 per flight booking. Some ecommerce partners like RedBus pay fixed amounts per transaction regardless of cart size.

     

    “At Myntra, we are working with several affiliate networks for more than two years, directly or indirectly. Affiliates drive about 10-15% of our overall transactions,” said Deepak Srikumar, head of digital marketing at Myntra.

     

    “The coupons on ecommerce site are usually directed at customer acquisition and ensure that the customer revisits the site the next time to redeem the coupons,” said Rachna Nath, leader of retail and consumer at advisory firm PwC.

     

    In 2012, Amazon entered in India through price-comparison and lead generation site Junglee, which it bought years earlier. Mature markets like the United States, have seen some couponing websites including Coupons.com, RetailMeNot.com, even go public in the past couple of years. Japanese ecommerce giant recently bought couponing site Ebates to enter the US market.

     

    The opportunity in India is also huge. Indian ecommerce market is expected to reach Rs 50,000 crore by 2016, according to Crisil. Going ahead, these sites are betting on mobile to drive its revenue. “We expect our mobile app to be a game changer,” said 30-yearold Sameer Parwani, who started CouponDunia from Boston in the United States in 2010. The company, which has now been acquired by Times Internet, is expanding its offline restaurant coupon business and expects to earn a revenue of Rs 40 crore in fiscal 2016.

     

    “With a higher discount range in all the online stores, people are completely involved in shopping online, mainly due to the cash on delivery and return policy features,” said KR Murle, founder of Getextrabux, a cashback, deal hunting and price comparison portal. The company, which was set up with an investment of about Rs 45 lakh, pays around 60-90% of the commission it earns to the customers as cashback.

     

    The tech-based companies have consciously chosen to stay away from the local-deals model. “Working with local retailers could be tricky as sometimes the deals get oversubscribed and they run out of margin,” said Swati Bhargava, cofounder of Cashkaro. “For us, online was a better way since it’s a volume game we are targeting.”

     

    Cashkaro said its sales have gone up 500% in one year. “While I don’t mind paying to (these couponing sites) to get new customers, if I had to pay for a repeat customer, I wouldn’t be very happy,” said Praveen Sinha, managing director of Jabong.

     

    The mobile-first has worked well for Mydaala. com which is one of the few surviving deal sites for local businesses. “We were one of the first to tap into analytics which helped us user-specific deals every time they logged in but presently no one seems to be working with local merchants,” said Anisha Singh, founder and CEO of Mydaala. com, which introduced couponing for all major telcos last year.

     

    However, local-deals space remains niche with few players venturing into it. “When we entered the market in 2011, there was a lot of competition in India and none of these sites curated the merchants who were a part of it. As a result, once the customer has a bad experience, he would never come back to the coupon or deal site,” said Ankur Warikoo, CEO of Groupon India.

     

    He said that Groupon has evolved to accommodate a mix of transactions keeping in mind the growing ecommerce industry. While local deals contribute to 60% of Groupon’s business, 25% comes from manufacturers who list directly with the site to sell and the remaining 15% is driven by travel deals.

     

    Source:The Economic Times

    Copyright © 2014, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved

    Licensed to republish

     

  • Jaldi 5 with Ankur Warikoo, CEO, Groupon India, on Crazeal.com’s first anniversary and the e-commerce explosion in India

    Jaldi 5 with Ankur Warikoo, CEO, Groupon India

    By Johnson Napier

     

    India has witnessed huge growth in e-commerce in the past one and a half years where customers online have been bombarded with innumerable offerings. But while many see the space as being crowded there are a few that are making a mark by way of their positioning. Like Crazeal.com, a portal that operates in the daily deals category space.

     

    As Crazeal.com celebrates a year of existence in India there are a lot of things that are going right for the portal like it has managed to sell more than 5 lakh deal vouchers and the fact that it has worked with more than 3000 unique merchants across the country.

     

    As it enters year two of operations, Ankur Warikoo, CEO, Groupon India is clear on the strategy to take the company far ahead. The strategy, he says, is to focus on the quality of deals as only then can it be in the business for a long time. “If you give the best quality of deals, customers will stay. We focus on one deal a day and make that special.” In an interaction with MxMIndia.com, Mr Warikoo says that Crazeal.com is in the market of products, travel and local services – and all three of them are growing at such a pace that for the next 1-2 years we are simply looking at consolidating base in the three.

     

     

    1 How inspirational has been the journey for Crazeal in India as it completed a year of existence in India recently?

    We entered the market just last year and have grown tremendously to reach the #1 rank in the daily deals category (as per ComScore data). We are experiencing super-normal growth quarter-on-quarter and repeat buying pattern of close to 50%. Additionally, we are recognized as the best destination for high quality deals, by our consumers, which is a fantastic achievement in just 12 months.

     

    We have attained this mark within one year of our existence in India because of the deal quality! Groupon globally works with the best merchants and offers the best deal structures to our customers, while solving business problems for the merchants. This has been the same philosophy India has worked on.

     

    We are strongly committed to the Indian market and are also launching our global robust technology to cater the needs of the merchants in India. The Merchant Center is an intelligent application that provides merchants a platform to evaluate and track their performance. The launch of this technological innovation in India will mark yet another milestone in our growth trajectory while setting unmatched global standards for the Indian e-commerce industry.

     

    2 How would you analyze your growth – both organic and inorganic, over the past year?

    I would like to present some key milestones:

    Featured more than 15,000 deals in 12 months

    Average transaction value highest in the category

    More than 5 lakh deal vouchers sold

    Worked with more than 3000 unique merchants across the country

    Sell a voucher once every 33 seconds

     

    3 The space has seen a sudden spurt in activity with a number of players stepping in with their offerings. How uniquely is Crazeal positioned among its competitive peers? 

    Competition is always healthy as it leads to the overall growth of the industry. For me, the real competition for Crazeal are other Groupon countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Hongkong. India has witnessed a huge growth in e-commerce in the past one and a half years and customers online have been bombarded with innumerable offerings. India became too crowded too soon and has been molded into a discount deal chasing set-up where merchants do not really understand how their businesses can benefit. The main objective of our channel is marketing. From day one, we have focused on having the right set of merchants on board. We start with city planning, doing merchant reviews followed by personal visits to experience what the merchant has to offer before closing the partnership deal eventually.

     

    4 Will you be laying more emphasis around marketing & promotions activity going forward? What is the budget that you have allocated for the same?

    Our strategy is to focus on the quality of deals as only then can we be in the business for a long time. If you give the best quality of deals, customers will stay. We focus on one deal a day and make that special. We are in the market of products, travel and local services – and all three of them are growing at such a pace that for the next 1-2 years we are simply looking at consolidating our base in the three.

    We will continue to entice consumers with our experiential marketing campaigns. For the birthday week we launched a special consumer campaign to surprise consumers with irresistible raffles every day. Up for grabs were 5gm Tanishq Gold Coins, iPads, Shoppers Stop gift vouchers, Sony Bravia- LED TV, Tata Nano and more.

     

    Previously, we have run ‘larger than life’ raffles including an all paid trip to Las Vegas for 2 at the Bellagio, and a free Harley Davidson bike which saw tremendous enthusiasm from consumers across the country.

     

    We recently hosted a special screening for Hollywood blockbusters – Spiderman and The Dark Knight Rises across 9 cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai, Jaipur, Chandigarh & Pune) and gave consumers and exclusive preview of our ad campaign. The special screening involved Crazeal team manning the ticket booking stalls, addressing the entire crowd before the start of the movie and steering on-ground activities to give them a flavor of Crazeal’s personalized services. Multiple on-ground touch points were also created to increase its brand presence and engage with consumers in a fun way. The tickets were priced at a 50% discount and the hall was booked exclusively for Crazeal consumers!

     

    Tell us a bit about your just-announced application Merchant Center. What is its USP?  

    As a commitment to the Indian market and to drive efficiency in operations, Crazeal has launched an intelligent application to provide merchants with a platform to evaluate and track their promotion performance.

     

    Each of our vouchers are bar-coded and have a unique QR code that helps merchants recognize customers who have bought their deal. It can also be done through our merchant mobile applications available on the iOS and Android platform.

     

    No internet company in India offers this kind of technology to their partners, free of cost!

     

    Merchant Center enables merchants to

    Track the number of vouchers their deal sells daily

    Check how many vouchers are redeemed in each of their outlets in different locations

    Get real time feedback from customers on their experience at the merchant’s outlet

    Determine how many customers would recommend the merchant to others

    Redeem the vouchers to enable their payments, on a real-time basis

     

    5 How do you see the e-commerce space panning out in the near future in India?

    Everyone is craving an eShare these days; corporates are looking at diverse product mix, merchants joining hands to offer strong value propositions and consumers shifting to online purchase for obvious reasons. This ePie surely has an opportune slice for all. And with 100 million internet users supporting the e-revolution, the total number of transactions in India is set to take a leap from the present 8-10 million to 40 million by 2015.

     

    The daily deal websites comprise India’s fastest growing web vertical. The coupon business is 16.5% of the total e-commerce audience in India, growing at the rate of 629 per cent with 7.6 million unique users a month in November 2011, as per comScore report. This clearly shows that Indian consumers who were earlier apprehensive about shopping online are now browsing more often to make high value purchases and avail experiential offers.

     

    Internet has played a silent but important role in giving a boost to India’s consumption story. With the advent of 3G, telecommunications and high mobile penetration, e-tailing in India has intensified closing many gaps between urban and rural consumer’s tastes, preferences and consumption patterns. Currently 60 percent of our sales come from six metros with remaining 40 per cent from non-metros. We see this trend catching up fast as consumers increasingly aspire to purchase brands and lifestyle products like never before.

     

    Tier I cities has already seen an explosion in travel and products related e-commerce. They will now witness the next big thing called local commerce. If one thinks of it, this new category is the most frequently consumed category in offline retail, which will now move to online.

     

    Tier 2 and 3 cities are lagging behind, but not in terms of growth. Products e-commerce has made major inroads driven by the ease of buying online and the massive assortment. Travel is following suit. However, local services might take some time as for that to develop as it requires a minimum number of high quality merchants to be present. With large restaurant chains now expanding and the food, wellness industry growing substantially there is a huge scope here.

     

  • What e-commerce needs is logistic efficiency at industry level, not at the player level, says Ankur Warikoo

    The Anchor: 5 musts in e-commerce to get to the next level

    By Ankur Warikoo

     

    Cross-sharing of a Logistic Network

    From a back end operations or a logistic perspective every e-commerce company is trying to build its own logistic setup which is their own last mile delivery network. While that is a very good initiative, it is not scalable because what you are ultimately doing is creating a large setup without the economies of scale.  So what e-commerce needs is logistic efficiency at industry level, not at the player level.

     

    Payment Gateway Efficiency

    Industry still suffers from miserable payment gateways options. The failure rates on credit cards, debit cards even net banking are fairly high, much higher than what the west experiences and for no logical reasons. So, we do need someone coming in with innovative payment gateway solution which makes sure that the customers entering legitimate data is never failed. The industry suffers from almost 25 per cent failure rate, which is extremely high. So a payment gateway innovation is required to make sure that the failure rates are lower.

     

    Cash on Delivery Innovations

    This was introduced to bring in people who do not have credit cards or debit cards and are more comfortable with cash transactions. However what has happened is that now cash on delivery is beginning to be misused as people are now using it as an excuse to test what kind of product is coming to their door step and if they don’t like it, they just reject it and that’s not a healthy practice. There needs to be an innovation around this, which means that Cash on Delivery should be restricted to only people who cannot transact through prepaid mechanisms like credit card, debit cards etc. and steps should be taken to not allow cash on delivery to be misused.

     

    Focus on Profitability and Sustainability

    All the companies now need to shift their focus towards profitability and sustainability. So far in the last 2.5 odd years the focus has been on top line growth, to get the customer in but, none of the players are closer to being profitable and definitely not sustainable. So, that needs to be a focus for e-commerce because if it is not profitable and sustainable then all customer pro initiatives could be taken away.

     

    Customer Relation Management

    CRM is missing from most e-commerce companies today. They are neither customer profiling to understand that there are different consumer behaviors and buying patterns. Understanding and treating your value propositions for each and every customer based on how they behave on your platform.

     

    Ankur Warikoo is the CEO of Crazeal

     

  • Crazeal enters cinemas for experiential marketing

    By A Correspondent

     

    Ankur Warikoo

    Crazeal.com ( India unit of Groupon Inc.US), a daily deals website has partnered with multiple cinema houses across India. The aim and objective is to offer a unique movie watching experience to Crazeal customers. The deal offered 50 per cent discount on the tickets along with a private screening to showcase Crazeal’s ‘Who Can Resist?’ campaign.

     

    Crazeal has rolled out a nationwide experiential marketing campaign to connect with consumers. The daily deals website partnered with multiple cinemas across nine cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai, Jaipur, Chandigarh and Pune) for a special screening of the movie Batman – The Dark Knight Rises. Over 3,500 tickets were said to have been sold in just under 30 hours.

     

    To buy this deal, Crazeal subscribers had to log on to the site, buy the deal and the tickets were delivered at their doorstep. Besides the screening, the Crazeal team were said to have interacted with the consumers. Each individual who came for the screening is said to have received a memento. Multiple on-ground touch-points were also created to increase brand presence and engage with customers.

     

    Launched in April 2011, Crazeal.com was formerly called SoSasta.com. On November 2011, SoSasta was rebranded to Crazeal.com because the name SoSasta did not have a positive connotation with their high quality merchants.

     

    In conversation with MxMIndia, Mr Ankur Warikoo, CEO, Crazeal said: “During the month of November 2011, we went into a rebranding exercise very early into our lifecycle and we called ourselves Crazeal.com which is short for crazy deal. We wanted to position ourselves as a great site which had fantastic discounts and crazy deals, but at the same time never compromising on the quality of the deals.”

     

    The business model of Crazeal is purely based on transaction wherein it first provides free of cost visibility to its merchants on the Crazeal website for one day. In return Crazeal asks the company (or merchant) to create a good package for its customers. For instance, it could be a five star hotel offering a certain amount of discount for a buffet, which the daily deals website then displays on its website as ‘deal of the day’.

     

    Once the deal is up and live, it is followed up by sending newsletters and SMSes to all Crazeal subscribers. Thus only after a customer buys a deal online is Crazeal paid its marketing monies. “We don’t make any money before the merchant makes money, but at the same time we are putting our entire resources right from creation of the deal, to imaging, and how it is marketed and so on. We, therefore, make our money only once our deal is sold,” he explained.

     

    By the end of December, Crazeal is expected to launch its mobile app for consumption, according to Mr Warikoo, the time is right for India to experience mobile transaction. “Time is right for India to experience mobile. By the end of December, India should see the GroupOn Crazeal mobile apps being launched for consumption. In the US, for instance, mobile already accounts to almost 20 per cent of transactions a month. In India already without a mobile application or without a mobile friendly site, 5 per cent of our transactions are already happening through our mobile phones. India is seeing 3G users increasing day by day, so it is just a matter of time before we have that app which is already in our radar and we are working towards it.”

     

    Crazeal is said to be a business which is currently focused on three categories, namely local services, product categories and travel. The local services include the best hotels and restaurants in the city, the best spa, and so on. Within the local services, food and beverages category dominate and accounts for nearly 55 per cent to 60 per cent of the overall revenue generated. Local services therefore account for almost 40 per cent of its business; product category accounts for similar share and the rest is taken by travel.