MetalJunction's pioneering work

MetalJunction, a sister concern of mJunction, is the largest e-marketplace for steel in the world, having sold over 4 million tonnes of steel for its clients and currently selling at an average rate of 150,000 tonnes per month. The buyer community of 5400 plus buyers comprising traders, fabricators, re-rollers and end-users have placed their confidence on MetalJunction because of the operational efficiency, transparency and equal access that the platform provides. MetalJunction's clients have experienced significant benefits on migrating to online selling. Immediately on migration, from their traditional sale process, to the metaljunction online process, their price realizations increased by up to 23%.

Recently in IIM Calcutta, I listened to a talk by Mr Viresh Oberoi, the Managing Director and founding Chief Executive Officer of mjunction services limited. It extended my thinking horizons and made me realize that ecommerce and specifically e-auction for B2B market also has a huge potential in India in addition to the traditional B2C ecommerce we talk about. Going by the supply chain rule book, the principals for a B2B and B2C ecommerce are the same, the only major difference being bulk purchase in a B2B scenario - this apothegm has been proved by Metal Junction in real life.

By using technology, primarily the internet, mJunction provides the steel companies with an opportunity to cut costs and at the same time increase revenue and enhance margins. The internet increases the reach of the companies in discovering new buyers, which in turn bring about quicker realizations. MetalJunction,a subsidiary of mJunction, pioneered the concept of eAuctions for steel by moving the entire process of auctions to the Internet. With state-of-art technology and unique services to support buyers and sellers in the decision making, financing and logistics stages they make sure that their auction tools help enterprises realize their sales and procurement goals with considerable cost savings.

Mr Oberoi's speech was astounding. In a country like India, where commodities such as Coal are heavily dominated by powerful lobby groups and run by Mafias in places such as Dhanbad, mJunction did a remarkable job in circumventing them and the all pervasive Indian bureaucracy in making the eAuction of Coal possible.

What is more heartening is that metal junction has mastered this supply chain process and is slowly moving into B2C sector such as financial services, auto and logistics. From his speech, I could gather that there is not much of a difference between B2C and B2B selling, specially from an ecommerce perspective.

A lesson for entrepreneurs - If you feel B2C segment is saturated with ideas of various kinds, check out B2B segment. However, to make a powerful entry into B2B segment one needs a backing of a strong promoter with good financial standing. One also needs a sound knowledge of the particular industry and a solid understanding of the tenuous human interplays.

What eBay has pioneered in B2C segment, Metal Junction did the same in B2B!!!

Conversion Optimization

Conversion Optimization (or Conversion Rate Optimization) is the science and art of getting a higher percentage of your web visitors to take action by becoming a lead or customer. It is a science because one cannot simply “guess and hope” which changes to the web pages would achieve a higher conversion rate. Hence, it calls for testing valid hypotheses, running controlled tests, and evaluating results. It is an art because it incorporates the aesthetics understanding also. A statistician or engineer alone cannot create the visuals and messaging that engage the web visitors. It mandates an organic and structured process which incorporates the learning from thousands of test results.

After the initial electric buzz of social media, companies are constantly asking for ROI(Return on Investment)? They argue that "What's the use of getting a ton of traffic to your site, if it doesn't impact our bottom line? That's where Conversion Optimization fits the bill.

Any online marketeer would agree with me that marketing response rates fluctuate widely from hour to hour, segment to segment and offer to offer.This phenomenon can be traced to the inability of humans to separate chance events from real effects. Moreover, drawing conclusions from a small sample of data - which inevitably has spurious patterns - is tantamount to some very poor decisions. Hence lot of companies extensively track click streams and use statistical methodologies to mitigate the urge to see patterns where none exists. These methodologies, or “conversion optimization” methods, are then taken a step further to run in a real-time environment. The real-time data collection and subsequent messaging as a result, increases the scale and effectiveness of the online campaign. Few good Conversion Optimization companies are listed below.

WiderFunnel’s Kaizen Method for Conversion Optimization


The Kaizen Method ensures that the Testing, Web Analytics and Website Design services work together to achieve client's business objectives. “Kaizen” means “continuous improvement” – and that’s what the client gets. As a starting point, this method analyze web analytics data, business goals, marketing research, competition, technical environment and demand-generation campaigns. The resulting Kaizen Plan identifies and prioritizes all conversion optimization experiment and web analytics opportunities to maximize the conversion rate improvement.

Invesp's Pii

Invesp believes that 14.56% conversion rate is possible and they have done it consistently over a period of time.

Key Points to note about Pii

• E-commerce websites report an average conversion rate of 2.2% according to shop.org
• Top 10 converting e-commerce sites report an average conversion rate of 12%
• Conversion rate optimization can provide up to 1/3 increase in profit
• Invesp's clients report an average conversion rate of 14.56% in 2007
• Invesp's clients report an average conversion rate of 9.8% in 2008

Few more resources you can read -

SearchEngine Guide
Squidoo

Life of Pi

I am sanguine that you all must have read the book by Yann Martel – Life of PI. Though a wonderful book by itself, today’s write-up is about a somewhat eponymous e-book reader named Pi, which has been launched by Infibeam.com – India’s premier shopping portal. This is an indigenous effort in supplanting its more expensive cousin – Amazon’s Kindle. As an Indian we definitely need to be proud of this feat, because the ideation, development and execution have all been done from scratch by Infibeam.

Delving on the technical details is not the reason why I wanted to write this article. However, some technical specifications are required to set the ground for a more strategic discourse. Infibeam Pi is small, sleek, and lightweight with 10 mm thickness and a weight of just 180 gm. With the 6" E Ink (R) display, reading an e-Book on Pi, gives the reader an experience akin to the one while reading a paper book. The 8-level gray scale with no backlit display provides a glare-free reading experience everywhere. The device can store up to 500 standard ebooks in its internal memory of 512MB and also has a SD card memory expansion slot that supports cards up to 4GB.

As any other product, adoption of Pi would follow the same Bell shaped “Product Life Cycle” curve, however, I feel it would be an eventual hit because of the following reasons( I could think of many reasons but these are, in my opinion the most important ones)

• It is an additional channel for content delivery - For long, the content creators and deliverers including the portals were looking for an additional content channel beyond websites and mobile. Pi’s coming of age should be a welcome respite to their long yearning search. To answer the question - why would content creators be interested in Pi? – I could argue that Pi being a mobile (you can carry it along) device could incorporate technological inventions in order to push location based and contextual advertisements to the e-book readers. Few years down the line Pi bundled with technological advances such as “Location Based Tracking” and “Augmented Reality” would be a force to reckon with and could completely change the way how content is delivered.
• It would abet vernacular adoption ­­­in India - Internet users generally preferring to read in local language has gone up from 59% in 2007 to 72% in the year 2008 – this was the message that came out loud and clear from a survey done by JuxtConsult couple of years back. Taking a cue from this survey, Infibeam is working towards a future where newspapers, magazines, books from local publishers, digital content in regional languages, textbooks and educational material would be available on Pi. With vernacular adoption being the recent trend in India, I believe, Pi would unlock the market, if not now but definitely in the near future. This is not to say that I am not aware of the challenges of vernacular adoption. However, challenges such as “Limited PC penetration in the country” and “Non Standardization” could easily be taken care of by the introduction of Pi.
• It is a multipurpose vehicle - Apart from the mundane yet mandatory features to boast about which includes readability, low cost, lightweight and local language support, Pi provides a way to listen to music while reading. Anyone who frequents ‘Borders’ or ‘Barnes and Noble’ would agree with me that coffee and bookstore go hand in hand. Likewise, Pi would provide a convergence platform in which music and book would be inseparable providing a more engaged experience for the reader. I can foresee a lot of prospective collaboration happening between e-book publishers and music companies in the years to come. Is “Tips and Chetan Bhagat” listening?
• It would change the book publishing game - It is a known fact that authors make the least money despite toiling hard for their books. Publishers, on the other hand make the most. However, Social media and Social influence marketing is forcing these publishers to rethink their value chain and their position as B2B companies. I feel, the introduction of Pi would act as a disruptive innovation circumventing the problems besetting this domain.

With the poor digital infrastructure compounded by the postponement of 3G auction, Pi would have an initial lukewarm response. However, as the ecosystem - digital infrastructure, author-publisher nexus, customer awareness - would evolve, the consumers would then realize the benefits of Pi thereby pitch forking its adoption process as a reinforcing loop. I believe “Pi” would curve its own niche in the year 2011.

An insightful survey for your next business move

This is an interesting survey I did during my internship. You can download the survey results from here. The survey results would provide a lot of strategic inputs to the small etailers as well as to the traditional brick and mortar firms.

The participating companies are listed adjacent to this paragraph. I interviewed the decision makers (CXO level) from many online retailing companies as well as traditional retailers.

The rationale for interviewing brick and mortar retailers was to understand their frugal presence online. In their answers lie a huge business opportunity for the online retailers - big and small. If you could read between the lines, you would understand what I mean.

This survey also would guide the novice upstarts in figuring out where the next business opportunity lie and would help pave ways in understanding how to co-create with competitors to build a ecosystem which would be profitable to all the players in the value chain - sourcers, fulfillment personnel, suppliers, distributors, warehouse owners, logistic providers and after sales support service providers.

Internet Retail Vision 2010 - A new beginning

Wirefoot India Technology (PVT) Limited hosted a day long event on Internet Retail, the Internet Retail Vision 2010 on the 28th of January 2010 at The Grand, New Delhi. The event focused on exploring the current Internet Retail scenario of India, its potential and the way ahead to explore this potential in a manner positive to the retail industry.The underlying theme was to help core retailers appreciate the benefits of Internet Retailing and address their concerns and issues. I wrote this article for the seminar, which eventually was a grand success. Click here to watch the webcast of the seminar.