Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

Online shopping will never pick up in India.

Atleast not the way it is currently designed.

It has been 14 years since Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com. And for the last 14 years nobody has really tried to change anything about the way in which Online Shopping is conducted. Ofcourse every year hundreds of startups with loads of funding try to tell us in different way, why they are better and why they give us a real choice. But the fact remains that even though the technology has been advancing for the last 14 years, nobody has really made a killing in the domain.

And that is in the US. India is different. And all startups want to do here is to localize the services offered in the US. Yes, they say, that is the key. So we have India centric search engines, India centric social networks, India centric everything. As if a nation of a billion people doesn’t have needs of its own. As if we don’t know what we need.

If we need to send flowers, they show us tiny 30×30 pixel photographs of flowers and tell us that they can send it to the ones we love, and show us the way to the billing. But is it what we were looking for?

What we are looking for is a good deal.

We want to pay for something that seems worth the price.

And then we want to bargain a little more.

That is what we want, and that is what we need to get. We want those old time salesmen, and we want to drive a hard bargian for every ten rupees. That is shopping to us and our fathers, and no IIT IIM graduate is ever going to change it. Only when we see a website that can give us something even vaguely similar, would we go there again and again, and swipe our credit cards to share some of our hard earned money with you.

(Ofcourse most companies also forget that it took Amazon 9 years to show some profit, and people are not just willing to wait that long anymore. But that deserves another post so I’ll leave it at that)