MxMIndia

Tag: Crazeal

  • 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.