Flipkart

Aman, as we were researching this, we took this to India as well, right? And every big emerging market built its own bridge.

Flipkart unlocked India's e-commerce in 2010 with cash on delivery for shoppers wary of putting a card online.

We lived this with in 2014, where over the lunar new year, WeChat's red envelopes had people linking bank accounts by the millions.

And then I don't know, take April 2016, a time when we really lived much more closer together.

It's in one of 5,000-plus dark stores run by Blinkit, Swiggy, Instamart, Zepto, and up from barely about 3,000 a year earlier, which is crazy.

So the corner shop now, essentially, Zubin, lives in a warehouse.

Yeah, and it isn't a niche, right? Bain and Flipkart put quick commerce at two-thirds of India's online grocery orders and a tenth of all e-retail.

And the money side matters.

After awareness, Ganesh knows I exist.

How does he try it? Does he have to go to a shop to buy it? Does he have to get into a car, take a bus? Then Amazon came, Flipkart came, you got it delivered.

What hasn't changed is once Ganesh tries it, The real value of brand is if he repeats it.

If he doesn't repeat, you're irrelevant.

You trust the channel.

You trust Blinkit.

You trust Flipkart.

You know the products are good.

What did you say in this sort of early conversation you had that can be useful for these agencies that still are struggling in finding a new position in this changing situation?

Yeah, so I think one thing which was a big advantage for us, because I come from an engineering background, and whenever I'm solving any problem, whenever I was at Flipkart or Omeo, Trivago, whatever company I worked for, whatever clients I worked for, I'm always not thinking about the problem I see in front of me, but I try to find the patterns.

I try to understand the root cause.

And then I go for fixing the root cause so that I don't have to solve the same problem again.

I think that was a massive help, right? So the good part was when I started my professional career, I was just told that I'm part of SEO technology team.

I had zero idea, right? I started with a Google search, whether SEO is really search and optimization, right? It began there.

And, but the good part was in my team at Flipkart, we did not have any SEO manager, right? So, but my engineering manager, he was the best manager one can ever expect, right? He was like, Hey, you do your research, come up with topics, right? And run those calculated risk experiments.

I'm with you.

In the case of Amazon, they provide a full stack service to sellers, which means that they have everything from logistics, packing, so on and so forth, available to the merchant in the form of both software as well as an offline ecosystem.

Sometimes, Amazon and Flipkart also have their own retailers.

In eBay's case, they don't have their own retailers, right? It's just a crowdsourced marketplace.

Whereas Amazon's case, they've got Cloudtail, which makes it easier for them to sell their own products to customers.

Yeah, I think they're going for equal ground, right? If I'm...

If I'm a Flipkart, if I'm a Meesho, I don't want to have substandard talent.

I want to go for the best talent.

I'm trying to build the best type of product.