e Magus

For past few days, I was busy tying up with a logistics fulfilment partner for my Ecom company www.celebstall.com .  I was also reading articles about how the drone technology will be used for commercial purposes. Google, Amazon, and many other players are working towards the last mile dash through drone delivery. In future, literarily, things will fall from the sky :) This made me wonder, can such a model exist in India? India is never far behind, when it comes to replicating success of any such initiatives, especially those undertaken by Ecommerce / technology companies. But replicating the delivery through drones will be tricky. Here are few random reasons why I think it will not work in India The drone might never reach its destination - wires, wrong address, stolen in mid air, bird attack, getting tangled in a kite thread No place to land…especially in the metros .. There are no open spaces (most houses open to the main road) & access to the apartment rooft...

This is a long form of what I had tweeted some days back. The strategy cycle: for marketing, it is digital; for digital, it is ecom; for ecom, it is going offline; when offline, it is marketing — Santosh (@santosheg) February 6, 2014 Each and every meeting, with various clients, has been about "time we moved to next stage" and depending on which stage the client was - the story changed. Stage 1: When the client is offline, enter the marketing strategy - the digital is the future (nay, present) and get him onto the bandwagon. There are various sub stages within this, POWS (Plain Old Website Stage), to Search Marketing, to Advertising, to Social, to Mobile Stage 2: When the client is doing Digital Marketing, it is strategy time to create business models in the space.. Enter Ecommerce, M-Commerce Stage 3: When the client is doing Ecommerce, then it is time to strategize and plan expansion through offline initiatives. It works meeting after meeting....each time, ...

An ecommerce site design is the ultimate test for UX, because, unlike corporate websites or portals, the entire business model hinges on the ability of the website to sell the products it hosts. Most website designs are built on the basic principles of - categorization, searchability, findability, relevance, cross-sell up-sell opportunities, product information, easy check-out etc. While these principles do hold good for successful design of any ecommerce website and are necessary, I think adding on 2 more components to your UX strategy would make the website design far more effective. One is based on the basic human behaviour and the Second based on experiences in real life Other than the fulfillment of a want or a need, we also shop to possess. Act of possession (for food, security) etc has been one of the earliest occupation of human societies. Some where down the lane, the division of labour happened, where men were predominantly working as Hunters & women as Ga...

Dear Remarketers, You have been one of the early adopters of this technology innovation in media - Remarketing. It is wonderful to see that 'performance' metrics drives your online campaign. As a digital marketer it is heartening for me to note that more and more of you are joining this band-wagon. Here is what I've experienced over the past couple of weeks. I was searching online couple of toys for my 3 year old son. After the necessary search and browsing, I zeroed on and the purchased items on the Amazon of India - FlipKart. Now I get bombarded by remarketing messages from FlipKart on the same toys (and another one which I browsed, but did not buy). Why? No clue. For God's sake!  I'm not a 3 year old with a credit card It should have been a simpler story for the website: I came, I saw, I bought. End of story. In case you still want to engage with me, go for sequels or with 'what-if' scenarios..but stop following me with non-relevant messages As...

Digital advertising is built on the story of performance measurement and ROI. Be it the CPM, CPC, CPL, CPA…and the other entire sundry C’s, the story is about everything being able to be tracked and measured. It is also about remarketing, behavioural targeting, etc… but frankly, is digital advertising all about WYSIWYG of the data that is shown in the ad-serving tool? I think not. While there needs to be a bias towards the numbers, there is also an untold story of a banner ad being effective but not captured in the tool. Few weeks back, I was looking for purchasing a formal pair of shoes. I checked few online stores on different brands, and the prices and offers they had. One particular site was Jabong.com . After visiting the website, I was shown remarketing ads of Jabong (the communication being of the Shoes :) ) on various other websites that I was visiting. On spur of the moment, I decided to remove all the cookies in my system I got busy and a we...

A few weeks back, I was working on a proposal for marketing of an e-commerce portal. One look at the stats showed that the e-tailing in India never took off. While categories like travel (led by IRCTC, and the OTAs) and Hotel bookings has taken of in a big way…it has been a dismal performance, when it comes to e-tailing. e-tailing can be defined as a business to consumer transaction through direct sale of limited quantity of goods or services.. The industry experts have been talking about the rise of e-commerce in India, but what is being missed out is that most of these e-com transactions are done on the B2B space. The data shows that the B2C industry size of ecommerce in India is around INR 11,000 crores*. About 80%* of the B2C e-com transaction is from the Online Travel Industry, followed by online classifieds The e-tailing pie is only about 9%*. While the numbers and growth might be encouraging, it is nothing great to make a big noise about (* Guesstimates by classical extrapolati...

There’s big money being spent in the Internet marketplace. Last year, more than $175 billion passed through the Internet in the form of airline tickets, insurance premiums, online bill payments and paperback books, among thousands of other items. But for many consumers, at some point in the process, the online transaction came to a screeching halt. Perhaps, the customer became frustrated with the typing in their shipping information. Maybe the person got cold feet just as it came time to type in a credit card number. Maybe the customer was never able to find the right product in a vast catalog of products. TeaLeaf, a San Francisco startup that analyzes online consumer behavior, has released a study that looks closely at e-commerce stop points - the place in the online process where a potential customer “walks away” from the sale. Clearly, TeaLeaf has reason to commission such a study - but it was interesting that the company looked beyond the stop-points of a sale - which is its sweet ...