The Future of Commerce is Personal: GoKwik co-founder and CEO charts the road ahead – CNBC TV18

Scale, Speed, Selection: India’s Commerce Moment

The conversation began with Chirag Taneja highlighting key trends that are driving the growth of commerce in India. He spoke of the rise in discretionary spends fueled by increased per capita income, in addition to convenience and variety as key drivers. “We were at one lakh SKUs 2 years ago, that’s grown to 20 million SKUs,” he revealed.

He also spoke passionately about the confluence of data, technology and innovation creating force multipliers. “This is a world where data is the new oil. Then you have intelligence which is the new drill, and then you have applications on top of it.” Leveraging a data and research backed approach, GoKwik has been able to solve numerous commerce problems and pain points, and help merchants improve Gross Merchandise Value (GMV). 

Solving the RTO Puzzle: Innovation in Action

A great example of this is the Return to Origin (RTO) problem, which eats into merchants’ bottom line. The specificity of the problem in India comes from customers’ intent to buy. “This is different from returns, this is someone who orders using the cash on delivery (COD) option and then decides not to take the order,” he explained. In GoKwik parlance, it was time to go back to the data. They studied over 120 million plus shoppers in their network and are now able to reliably predict the outcome of a particular order, allowing merchants to pivot strategies accordingly. 

These options ranged from not offering COD options to certain customers in extreme cases, to additional charges, to a novel solution that solves for both customer intent and merchant logistic costs: Part Pay COD. With GoKwik’s novel Part Pay COD solution, the customer prepays a small portion of the cost of the article purchased – thereby cementing their intent and introducing skin in the game. This skin in the game lowers the chances of the delivery being rejected, while also covering some of the merchants’ logistics costs. 

The Personal Touch: AI’s Role in Customer Journeys

Given the ubiquitousness of AI, Chirag Taneja addressed the impact of AI on all aspects of the customer journey, in particular, the new horizons in personalisation that it opens to marketers and merchants today. For instance, marketers and brands are able to enable better discovery by surfacing personalized and increasingly targeted ads. These ads can often include singalling which is very specific to customers – like customers in Bangalore seeing rain imagery in ads during a brief rainshower. 

“Similarly, when you land on the website, I can show you information which is most sought by you, depending on your behavior. I can have more social proof – have some of your friends used it and what do the reviews look like. All of that is becoming a possibility. If you’ve decided to buy, I can make it more frictionless. Right now, the world is about how do you make it single click.” He also talked of AI’s potential in other areas of the business – specifically, in service operations and fraud prevention. 

Commerce Reimagined: Building for Tomorrow

The conversation also spanned the broader commerce trends GoKwik has unearthed, with specific insights from Chirag Taneja on the three key pillars of commerce: convenience, selection and affordability. He also touched upon proactive commerce, and the marrying of customer needs with drive demand forecasting, supply chain optimization, and hyper-local warehousing. Looking forward, he made several predictions on how data and emerging technologies are bringing next level omni-channel integrations, seamless shopping experiences that leverage AR/VR to embed commerce into entertainment platforms, and how using drones and micro-warehousing can change the game on delivery speed and cost efficiency. 

To dive deeper into these insights, be sure to watch the curtain raiser with Chirag Taneja, and catch up with everything that is transforming the commerce landscape at the Future of Commerce Conclave 2.0 

Note: This is a partnered post.