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For Antony Kattukaran, an entrepreneur in the e-commerce space, good news came as a pair. The first had to do with the combined $3-billion investment by rivals Flipkart and Amazon, which told him the ballooning online retail industry will need his new search engine optimiser more than ever before. He has named it Tagalys, and it can lead a prospective buyer straight to a red polka-dotted skirt – if the store has one.
The other glad tiding was about global communications company Pitney Bowes’ e-commerce management accelerator in New Delhi, which will give him six months of mentoring by experts in the field. “I’m excited about it, and it says a lot about the prominence of the e-commerce enabler segment,” he says. Kattukaran’s excitement is shared by scores of entrepreneurs in a rapidly changing online retail scene, marked by big investments, rising competition and marketing costs, a push toward turning browsers into buyers online, and a withdrawal from discount wars.
His target group includes mid-sized portals that lack adequate technology and e-commerce sites that are just starting up. “Big players such as Flipkart have a robust tech team to reverse engineer. But, if I sell (Tagalys) to smaller firms, I would have built a search engine market by end of this year,” he says.
The other frontier is payment, where a lot of Websites face flak for failed transactions.
Sreekrishnan Ganesan, a 30-year-old entrepreneur, takes care of it for 22 stores, including grocery shopping portal BigBasket, and ticketing firm ticketgoose.com. Users can raise issues in payment and delivery on Turnaround, which is integrated with the e-commerce Websites’ mobile applications. Another key focus could be the homepage of the Websites themselves, which need to be visually pleasing, and clutter-free, says Sreepriya Koppula. Her Turnaround software allows users to look at the other side of a shoe or how a pair of trousers fit in the back. This 3D viewing facility powers visuals at Flipkart, Myntra and Snapdeal. “Though the big players can figure out our solutions in some time, we have a huge market of small firms and individual designers out there,” says Koppula.
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