Google India’s director for e-commerce and online classifieds Nitin Bawankule talks to FE’s Anand J ahead of this year’s Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF), which started Tuesday midnight.
How different is this year’s GOSF from the previous editions?
We started off with 90 merchants in 2012, last year we had 250 merchants and this year it is 450 sellers. It was a one day affair in 2012, while this year the website has gone online 14 days prior to GOSF and we are running a competition for shoppers and there will be one winner everyday. This is because of the heightened interest and activity and the idea is to spread the message of online shopping across the country. With this, we want to bring many first time online shoppers to the industry.
The e-commerce industry has evolved a lot over the past year or so. How has that affected GOSF?
The big difference is a single e-commerce player running a campaign to direct traffic on its website and the whole ecosystem of merchants trying to create awareness about online commerce and this will drive more shoppers online. If you see the list of merchants, there are lot of offline players who are not generally associated with online commerce like Asian Paints, real estate players or Lakme are participating in GOSF. Consumers come to know that he can buy these products online.
Discounts are the order of the day. How do you stay relevant?
Objective of GOSF is not discounts. It is not the primary reason why shoppers buy online. Most surveys show that people prefer e-commerce because of convenience and catalogue the platform offers. From one player driven discount and sale, GOSF is a platform where 450 merchants are participating and the consumers are spoilt for choice. No single player is present across all the categories in an exhaustive way that you might not have even heard of. For instance, Flipkart does not sell FMCG or Amazon is not big on apparel yet. You wont see Asian Paints on online platforms usually.
Do you see the e-commerce players getting indifferent towards GOSF?
There are only 3.5 crore people buying online whereas the internet population is approaching 30 crore users. That is almost 90% of our internet users still have not done a single transaction online. The bigger players have not managed to bring this population online yet. Most of the e-commerce players are excited about this and you can see it from their participation in GOSF. There are lot of smaller and offline players participating in the event. Why should we restrict to the top players or even the 450 merchants. We have millions of small shops. We had to drop many because their websites were not up to the mark or they have not figured out the logistics. Over the past year the logistics have improved helping us to have even 450 merchants and we told the merchants well in advance for them to prepare for GOSF. Many have invested in front end and back end capabilities.
How is Google going to benefit from GOSF?
As a key player in the internet ecosystem, we expect that consumers search for product information on Google. Our endeavour is to expand the overall internet ecosystem and that is true of any of the initiatives that we run that will in turn empower the consumer. There is a huge mass of population in smaller cities of the country wanting to buy products online as the specific products are not available offline. Everyone will have the same information and nobody is under-privileged on internet. The growth of Android has also helped the e-commerce industry grow as we helped the smartphone and the internet population to explode.
