At a small hotel in Bengaluru, the three Bansals of Flipkart—Sachin, Binny, and Mukesh—were sitting with the team of subsidiary fashion e-retailer Myntra for a strategy offsite. Sachin conducted the proceedings with the air of a father figure, a senior manager recalls. Binny summed up the discussion points and the next steps. Sachin wanted to press on with an aggressive mobile strategy that he believed held the key to the future for the Flipkart-Myntra combine.

His inspiration came from consumer behaviour. As the head of a company that derived a large share of its revenue selling phones, he knew the age of the smartphone was here. Insmartphone sales in India touched million. If the average young smartphone user has space for five apps, analytics firm App Annie typically names WhatsApp messagingUC Browser browsingFacebook social mediaand Hotstar entertainment or TrueCaller caller ID as four of them.

At stake was something far more precious than revenues: It is this data that drives engineering and innovation—the zillion lines of code that lure customers into buying more, or revealing their preferences so that they can be shown things they may want to buy.

Whoever controls this data controls the market. Amazon had lost China, bullied by local players who understood the market much better. Without that advantage, it was a matter of time before Amazon trounced Flipkart in its own backyard.

There was only one road ahead: Focus every last engineering dollar on building a wall around mobile. From earlyFlipkart started herding its mobile site users to its app, shutting down phone-browser traffic. Myntra went a step further—it shut down its desktop site and became app-only. Sachin knew he risked losing a large chunk of users. Rather, he saw it as a way to identify a mass of loyal users on mobile.

In hindsight, the thinking proved too abstruse for his own team. Its two biggest rivals, Snapdeal and Amazon India, were roughly half way behind as of March Trail of the Tiger. But as Flipkart ran its race, something sneaked up on it. Audacity suddenly seemed to be losing out to the other stuff that decides winners: Flipkart wanted to be the reason Indians bought products on the Internet. Its focus on technology to solve product e-commerce for the domestic market put it in a league of its own: Their mandate to the team is to innovate constantly.

And nearly three years after Amazon launched in India, it is technology that is the theatre for a battle for the ages: Both Sachin Bansal and Amit Agarwal, country manager of Amazon India, are techies before being CEOs, meaning they have built organisations where tech thinking has primacy over everything else.

More crucially, it was the choices Flipkart made around technology—chief among them that decision to go mobile-only—which defined the derring-do and exacerbated the fault lines within the company, prompting naysayers to all but write it off.

And yet, a clear understanding of those choices, sans drama and intrigue, has been missing from the narrative. Hindustan Lever, Thums Up vs. Toyota Motors—with technology as the leitmotif. Flipkart has scale and local nous. Amazon has staying power and a platform it has seasoned globally for 21 years.

How to Return your Purchased Product on Flipkart - Gizbot

Which combination will carry the day? The Flipkart founders did not speak to us for this story, but Amit Agarwal did. This story also gives them a voice. Amazon became the second-largest U. In India, this was the time when all the talk was about jittery investors pulling back from underperforming copycats of Valley successes. Business daily Mint said it with a revealing headline: It coincided with growing chatter about how Flipkart had missed its GMV target for the full year.

By August, it had got Amitava Ghosh, former CTO of cab aggregator TaxiForSure, to head its Bengaluru development centre of techies. Another e-commerce upstart Paytm was already leveraging its origin as a mobile wallet company to differentiate itself. Everything is focussed on the app. That is the flagship experience we are building. Some of it was borderline bizarre. For instance, serial entrepreneur Alok Kejriwal described the desktop shutdown as a ploy by Flipkart to slow down sales, which would help the company in pruning losses since each sale still costs the company money.

As it turned out, the plan was a non-starter. In Novemberseven months after it all began, Flipkart revived its mobile site amid a barrage of complaints from angry customers. Myntra would also reopen its catalogue on the Web and is working to restore its desktop site too. But that one move gave Amazon just the opening it needed to go in for the kill. Inevitably, there were tensions within Flipkart. You can see why, if you consider that Flipkart had spent millions of dollars to amass these users in the first place.

USERS ARE ONLY one part of this battle. The other, less visible part, involves sellers. Winning sellers is critical to dominating e-commerce in India. Amazon went after sellers right from its entry in India and has scaled its network from in to 85, Flipkart, on the other hand, had to adjust its focus to keep pace—since its inception, when there was no regulatory dicta for e-commerce, it had focussed all its resources on getting more customers and not sellers.

Flipkart breached theseller mark this February. A video by the company captures how shopkeepers generally do their stock checks. They scribble code letters to help them remember if a product is in stock. The role of technology is to replicate the comfort of this unique physical behaviour on an app.

Only that will hook sellers to the app and keep them coming back, says Agarwal. But scaling calls for a lot of handholding, since most sellers are exploring the online medium, and the technology driving it, for the first time. According to a source who works in the seller ecosystem, this is where Amazon scores big. It woos sellers with rich data analytics that can be understood by any layperson.

It also invests heavily in smooth resolution of payments. Chai Carts are three-wheeled vehicles that serve tea, water, and lemon juice to small business owners even as Amazon reps teach them about selling online. With Tatkal, a studio-on-wheels, Amazon helps sellers launch services in less than an hour, including registration, imaging, and cataloguing services, as well as basic seller training.

In the past six months, Amazon India has launched 21 such nodes. It is an India-first innovation for the company. The tech entrepreneur who has worked with both companies outlines areas where Flipkart has improved.

But Agarwal brings the conversation back to customers. And to think that Agarwal, Sachin, and Binny once worked from the same office, where all three of them honed the beliefs that would take them on their separate journeys.

IT IS THE LAST DAY of the financial year Did you know Sachin and Binny back when all three of you were with Amazon Web Services AWS?

Flipkart Customer Care: Toll Free Contact Number and Email ID

Those were anxious days for Agarwal. Amazon has similar units in 13 countries, including China, Japan, and five in Europe. Sincehe had been in charge of about 50 software engineers who were innovating for the Amazon. Agarwal was an early believer of the Amazon story. That letter has appeared in every Amazon annual report since. But Agarwal was not assigned to the e-commerce business. Every day, I was sceptical: What am I doing in this team? Amazon was going after a diverse set of customers: Broadcom backdating stock option was always travelling with him and sitting in on his meetings.

Many others stayed on at ADC or took ea for free binary option trading strategies assignments at other Amazon locations worldwide before returning to call back option in flipkart e-commerce in India. But there were two coders who moved on: Like most young coders, they were geeks. Sachin loved gaming, while you were likely to catch a painfully shy Binny reading Stieg Larsson.

Their candlestick in forex trading styles complemented each other. Sachin would set outrageous goals, Binny would cash earn money online paid surveys free india out the steps to get there.

Sachin quit ADC first, in Sachin told Fortune India in late Why should that be? If people can trust Internet companies steve cohen stock trader their credit card information online for tickets, why not for products? He identified customer service as the missing link.

We jumped in with that intent: It would be expensive. But Binny argued that technology offsets the cost of building physical presence, after who to write earnest money to company crossed the top 30 cities. This—suburban India—was the threshold where access to products as well as authentic customer data typically dwindled in physical retail chains. This was the big opportunity for e-retail.

BYFlipkart had committed to expanding its logistics and delivery arm, which accounted for a large chunk of its 3, employees. Even that was a big morgan stanley call options given as recently as two years before, the tech team was just Sachin and Binny. Back then, Flipkart used shared servers. But its tech focus was sharply evident. Today, the number is 10 million a day.

At the backend, Flipkart had large servers. There were payments-tech teams to integrate with the IT systems in banks, Visa, MasterCard, and so on. Flipkart was then delivering in seven cities.

The focus was on reliability—building out logistics and improving warehouse systems and technologies to handle scale. But all along, its engineering team was readying the platform to serve many, many more destinations. For Flipkart customers inthe order actually reached home in the promised time, often in two days in large cities. It was solving a far greater number of problems than early starters eBay India or Fabmall, which had entered the space before the turn of the century, or even newer competitors like Snapdeal and ShopClues.

Snap Kart Flip Deal. Flipkart was spending much more how to make robux fast on roblox any of these companies, yes.

But it was also deploying more tech—and faster—to grab the lead in amassing customer data. Inits contemporary Homeshop18 had 2. But with Amazon at its heels, it had to turn its attention to building a lasting edge. ITS MASSIVE SCALE and implications meant the bet could have only come from Sachin. Ex-employees say Sachin call back option in flipkart vital to the product and engineering pack that is core to Flipkart and its culture.

In both big calls of the past—last-mile logistics and CoD—he had played oracle. His goal-setting had a galvanising effect on techies, especially because Indian consumer Internet companies before Flipkart were technical analysis of stock trends ninth edition pdf ambitious about local markets. If catalogues are to be created for the website, compiling information from tens of thousands of sellers, it involves designing a standard framework forand more listings per month—cutting out duplication.

The goal is accuracy. You have to win customer trust because that catalogue is all a customer sitting far away can go by. This is what Binny, with his eye for detail, would oversee. The Myntra acquisition added a formidable third leg to the Sachin-Binny partnership: Myntra had given Flipkart the largest market share in fashion. Mukesh Bansal's plans for Myntra. The Flipkart founders were excited about the new configuration.

They often stated in public forums that their investors have allowed both companies to run independently. Flipkart and Download forex income engine 2.0 had grown from being startups, and the three co-founders enjoyed exchanging learnings.

There was a lot to learn from Mukesh.

He had survived an attack from Rocket Internet-backed Jabong and kept Myntra ahead. Even under capital constraints, he had invested in hiring leaders like Ganesh Subramanian from Walmart as chief operating officer and Shamik Sharma from the Bay Area to head technology.

Pre-acquisition, Myntra would often lose out to Flipkart in hiring tech talent because it was perceived to be more of a fashion brand than a tech venture. Given that track record, Mukesh was asked to put tech leadership in place at Flipkart.

The ideal candidates would have experience in solving problems for million-plus users—think Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Square. During our conversation at the time of the Myntra-Flipkart deal, Mukesh laid out the task: In fact, we are seeing a massive shortage of technology talent.

Another key hire was chief product officer Punit Soni, who had earlier led a series of important product portfolios at Google.

Another ex-Google recruit was chief technology officer Peeyush Ranjan, who worked as senior director of engineering for the search giant based out of Mountain View, and had also led engineering at Google India out of Bengaluru.

At Google, he had closely overseen the development of Google Map Maker, a product that allowed users to edit Google Maps. It was a solution designed specifically for India, where publicly available addresses are often fragmented and inaccurate.

Ranjan also understood the value of the local coder solving local problems. At Google India, for every one engineer focussing on India, roughly 10 were solving problems for the rest of the world.

By earlyFlipkart had a new management structure. It would now have three decision-makers—Sachin, who would head new initiatives, Binny, who would look after supply chain, and Mukesh, who would be responsible for the core commerce platform, with product and engineering Soni and Ranjan reporting to him. In hindsight, this was another area where Amazon India had a better plan: BEZOS BEGAN TYPING his shareholder letter with the following words: Two years after the financial meltdown, one thing had to be made clear to financial investors: The geek will inherit the earth.

They include other businesses like AWS and the on-demand video network that is taking on Netflix. But with e-commerce as its flagship, Bezos knows technology spending is vital for long-term dominance. Why does that matter to Amazon India?

The ADC Agarwal incepted in Bengaluru as a member team in now employs more than 10, across four Indian cities. Then, there is the exchange of ideas. Amazon India can afford to prioritise mobile product development, as the other global centres continue work on the desktop product. In its home market, the U. A delegation of Amazonians from Europe was in India in March to understand two-factor authentication.

New recruits at Amazon undergo engineering boot camps and hackathons across geographies. Chatterjee has made passport mandatory for his team members after they complete technical analysis for trading binary options regulated years.

For an Amazonian in India, tasks on the collaborative platform broadly come under three buckets. First, engineers sitting in another location black scholes employee stock option calculator help develop a solution for India.

Second, there may be features Amazon India is working on which are already on the global product road map and need to be accelerated. In this case, engineers from India step in. And how to trade exotic binary options profitable, building a solution for India that is not on the global road map.

Sahi cites an India-first feature exported globally: When the user opens the Amazon app, it automatically reads the mobile number in the background. The user is prompted to set a password based on an OTP one-time passwordwhich too the app can read automatically.

How to arrange a call back from Flipkart support ?

But even he may not have fully understood how the consequences of his decision would ripple through the company he had built. According to an App Annie analyst, Amazon led Flipkart on Google Play downloads in Q1specifically in January and February. He had mulled over it for almost three quarters—analysing every possible data point and leading indicator—and only then did he put it forward as a directional shift, says another manager.

Going app-only would mean users would have access to only one channel. In effect, the company could innovate based on actual learnings of the limitations users experienced. Flipkart shut off that option for seven months.

For instance, how many apps would people keep? Why push them away by cutting out the browser? But there was probably no need to shut down mobile web. The confusion within the ranks claimed a series of high-profile scalps. Given his rapid rise in Flipkart, the news shocked many.

Conspiracy theories started flowing, the most common one suggesting a fallout with Sachin and Binny. But in a conversation with one ex-employee, I hear something that may explain a fallout, had there been one: Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University, has a keen eye on Indian tech entrepreneurs. In Marchin The Economic Times, Wadhwa compared the development to Google co-founder Larry Page allowing Eric Schmidt to take over as CEO under pressure from the board.

He sets very high bars.

One of the tougher challenges Mukesh undertook was to make Flipkart a leaner, more efficient organisation. Its headcount was ballooning every quarter.

Its legal team alone is estimated to be around 40 persons almost as big as a mid-sized legal firm. The HR department is some persons.

By the end ofFlipkart was a 35,person organisation; almost half of them were part of the supply chain overseen by Binny and around 15, were on contract. Mukesh was heading the core commerce platform, with fewer than 2, employees, including engineering and product. He wanted to make this unit leaner. But the mobile-only strategy would prove to be the biggest distraction for the core team.

As head of product, his task was to build customer-facing features. Turning off users went against that very basic tenet, especially if Flipkart was serious about building a following of million shoppers.

One industry observer comments: Both were right in their own ways. Soni, responsible for product, wanted to expand the existing user base and keep it user-friendly.

The mobile strategy would estrange users and sabotage the mission. A strategic consultant in Bengaluru tells me: It is not clear how Sachin countered Soni. But two sources try to paint a picture of what he might have said: There are fewer than 40 million online buyers of products today.

If Flipkart had to build a strategic advantage, it had to innovate for users beyond the 50 million mark, which is a kind of industry benchmark. Reaching million users, its ultimate goal, entailed going really deep into India, dominated by lower-end smartphones with less storage.

Flipkart needed to aggressively pursue this path before Amazon got there. According to a former senior manager at Myntra, Mukesh was initially in favour of taking Myntra app-only. Amazon claimed in a press release that in tier I cities, it saw an almost 2. It also saw a 4. All these cities clocked a growth of 3x or more in comparison to January last year.

The app was drawing users to offset those who went away. By Januarythe app had 8 million active users—almost twice the number 12 months before.

Two industry sources dispute this, saying Myntra was also spending big on discounts. In the October-December quarter ofMyntra ranked fifth among shopping apps by monthly active users on App Annie, behind Flipkart, Amazon, Paytm, and Snapdeal.

With the desktop still live, there were fewer user dropouts for Flipkart compared with Myntra. But the ones who left were turning to Amazon. There were talks that Flipkart may also go app-only. According to the source, by now he was fundamentally opposed to the experiment because he believed it was not customer-friendly.

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But Sachin stayed firm because this was a strategic call. Around three months later, there was a management rejig at Flipkart. Binny was made CEO, and Sachin became executive chairman. Fortune India gathered a variety of market-share data from industry sources. This means if Flipkart sold goods worth Rs on its platforms, Amazon sold goods worth Rs 70 in the same period.

Did Flipkart let go of the four-quarter advantage that Lee Fixel envisaged early on? Did the lower GMV outlook dent its chances of raising big-ticket funds? Yes, because fundraising is often a multiple of market share. You could also say that Flipkart gave away its hard-earned momentum to Amazon. But there is one thing Flipkart got right: In the face of the most daunting competitor in the world, it leaned towards innovation and invested in a world-class technology leadership team.

For a moment, think about Big Retail in India. The industry is now riding the omni-channel wave, bullish on the imminent rise of the 4G-enabled shopper. But has Future Retail or Reliance Retail faced the likes of Walmart, Target, or Carrefour? Flipkart did face its biggest challenger—and it responded in the only way it could, by making bold calls based on technology.

Or, think of how Meru Cabs, stuck in its desktop legacy, was defeated by Ola, which was quickly engineered for the app generation. Ultimately, if you cannot trust technology and take quantum bets, there is no long-term future for you in e-commerce.

Last November, Flipkart launched Lite with the aim to deliver an app-like experience on the mobile browser. If you are a Lite user, you could think of it is a 4 kb version of flipkart. He led a team of five engineers who developed Lite in 42 days. The Internet in India has an anaemic average speed of 2. Ranjan was largely able to move the needle at Flipkart from being mobile-only to mobile-first in keeping with this sobering reality. Our ultimate goal is not to get the user to install an app.

We want to give the user the best experience possible. Sure, this is possible on apps, but can we try another way? Ranjan called some friends at Google Chrome for help. Google implemented features like a home screen icon for Lite, which gave it the same look and feel as an app.

How do I solve the hard problems of India through technology? No Indian company or multinational was dedicated fully to that. Fortune India 40 Under 40 Most Powerful Women All Rankings Markets Technology Consumer Startups Green Health Auto Energy Money Beyond Borders Macro Et Cetera Archives Advertise Events.

Most Powerful Women Fortune India The Next Strategy People. Going back to school online. Building blocks of a monopoly. The bazaar that got bigger. Mahindra steers SsangYong out of trouble. Technology E-commerce Flipkart vs. May 5, Forget the furious debates on discounts, GMV, and valuation. It was always about code. Amit Agarwal, vice president and country manager, Amazon India Without that advantage, it was a matter of time before Amazon trounced Flipkart in its own backyard.

Trail of the Tiger But as Flipkart ran its race, something sneaked up on it. This is the story of what those debates forgot. For them, it is not just an expenditure they incurred in the initial phase. Flipkart Amazon Unicorn New Economy Analysis. CONTACT US ADVERTISE TERMS OF USE PRIVACY POLICY REPRINTS.