Teardown Of Myntra’s App Mantra

India’s leading online fashion brand Myntra recently shut down its desktop and mobile websites and decided to go mobile app only. As far as I know, this is an unprecedented move by any ecommerce player anywhere in the world and flies in the face of moves by brands to increasingly hop on to the omnichannel … Read more

Mitigating Fraud Does Not Pay The Bills

Many discussions on security standards emphasize how Chip + PIN and Two Factor Authentication reduce fraud loss and exhort countries using Magstripe / Chip + Signature and Single Factor Authentication (e.g. USA) to immediately migrate to the newer technologies. Take for instance the Finextra article entitled Campaign pushes for US adoption of chip and PIN. … Read more

Treat Every Pageview As A Conversion Opportunity

Before developing a food discovery startup’s GTM strategy, we recently did a test drive of its mobile app. The app lists dishes of various cuisines from restaurants in the local neighborhood. Like many hyperlocal startups, this one also started operations in one city and then had plans to expand to other cities. As soon as … Read more

Retargeted Ads Or Retarded Ads?

Retargeted Ad is one of those things on which my take as a consumer is diametrically opposed to that as a marketer. As a consumer, I hate them. As a marketer, I love them. For the uninitiated – or, in this case, the unchased – retargeted ads are the banner ads that follow you around … Read more

Five Ways To Sweeten A Deal – Apart From Discount

Traditional retailers aka kirana stores sell almost everything at MRP* whereas modern retail aka supermarkets sell almost everything below MRP (for the unintiated, this and other India-specific terms are explained at end of the post). Since Indians are price-sensitive, modern retail should totally corner the Indian retail market, right? Wrong! Modern retail accounts for barely … Read more

Retail Is Still Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce

In Retail Is Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce, I’d listed three reasons why I’ve increasingly turned to ecommerce for my shopping needs. As you might recall, none of them was related to price. In the recent past, there were two more reasons why I went online. Money Back Guarantee I recently bought a car charger … Read more

Is “Too Frictionless” Even A Thing?

Personally I love frictionless CX and I was glad that I could make a business out of my passion when I launched Conversion Rate Optimization as one of the services of my company’s Digital Marketing+ offering. All along I’ve been debating with myself and my customers whether there’s an optimum level of being frictionless or … Read more

Loyalty Gifts – Buy Or Earn?

Those of us who redeem our loyalty points on gift portals will have inevitably come across a gift or two that was appealing to us but was beyond our reward points balance. On some gift portals, it’s possible to pick up the goodies by simply paying up the difference with cash e.g. Lufthansa WorldShop, IHG, … Read more

Going From Card To COD

I’ve been buying stuff online since circa 1998 but a few recent events have taken the edge off my enthusiasm for ecommerce: Driven by VCs braying for profits, many Indian ecommerce players have moved from the traditional inventory model to the asset-light marketplace alternative. Thanks to my exposure to this model via eBay India several years ago, … Read more

Top 10 Blog Posts of 2014

Welcome to the first blog post of 2015! The Top 10 posts of 2014 were: #10: Big Pharma Turns To CEM For Cure #9: Did Google Acquire FeedBurner Minus The CAPTCHA? #8: How To Make Co-Creation Work? #7: Retail Is Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce #6: Does CX Really Drive Sales? #5: How To Lie With Big Data #4: Frictionless … Read more