 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to day two of the Tech and Innovation Summit 2021. In this session, we will have a keynote address by Prakash Kumar, who's the co-founder and CTO of Cartmax. And the topic of his keynote will be how tech is turning DTC businesses more efficient and profitable. Prakash is a tech-preneur, co-founder and principal architect of Cartmax. He's also CTO at Green Honjo, a leading e-commerce solutions company where he lets tech implementation for 50 plus DTC brands from India and Western countries. Thank you for joining us and over to you. Profitability is elusive for many of the DTC businesses today. As per some industry reports, nearly 98% of DTC businesses find it very difficult to become profitable when they sell through their own website or app. While the e-commerce industry has been in India for nearly two decades, however the industry leaders or the marketplaces are not profitable yet. They are primarily investing into product, sales, marketing, customers, post-order experience and operations efficiency. Now while brands are selling the same products everywhere, be it at the marketplace or at their own channel, the marketplaces are actually doing a better job in the other food buckets. And this is where technology can help. Hi, I am Prakash Kumar, the co-founder and product architect of Cartmax, an enterprise-grade e-commerce platform. I am also the CTO of Greenhaunchers, a leading DTC enabler for nearly a decade. In this PowerPack session, we will talk about 7 specific areas where you can leverage technology to make your business more resilient, efficient and competitive. So we will talk about the infamous DALIMA about build versus buy and what is the right option for you. We will also talk about monolithic versus headless architecture. We will also talk about how do you know if you are overspending on technology or under spending, what is that magical figure for your business. And how do you know if you have adopted the right DTC technology that is good enough for your team to run it. We will also talk about whose advice do you trust. Not every company has the same talent pool and hope your business is not limited because it couldn't afford hiding the top talent. I promise I will keep it quick so let's start. So when the question comes about build versus buy, our advice to most of the businesses is go for the second option and that is buy instead of building it from scratch. Because most of these DTC businesses are not built to really develop and maintain technology. Because once you go into that loop of building the software then yes, basically it opens a Pandora's box for most of the businesses. So all of it creates a loop where you are on a constant circle in a loop of developing the software. You need to worry about its upkeep and maintenance. You need to battle attrition. You will need to keep your software relevant over the course of years and the problem is whatever is cutting is today may become obsolete very soon within a few years. So you will have to continuously remain invested into that build option. On the other option, if you go with the buy option and in simpler terms, if you subscribe for any SaaS services, then two things happen. You need not to bother about all the headaches that comes with the build and the maintenance of the software. One, your management focus bandwidth is reserved for the task that you really want to do and that is your actual product development in its marketing. And the second, your cost becomes predictable. Most of the SaaS platforms actually charge you a per transaction basis or consider a part of your revenue in a revenue share model. So that keeps your cost predictable into technology and that is the biggest benefit that you get when you go for the buy option. Most of the popular CMSs that you hear out there, the off-the-shelf CMSs, likes of Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCard, PrestaShop, etc., these are actually the examples of monolithic piece of software. Why monolithic? Because a single piece of software is taking care of almost every part of your platform, whether it is your catalog management or it is your cart and checkout experience, whether it is my account experience or your admin panel, each of it is taken care of by a single piece of software and it is connected to a single database. That creates a major problem. In fact, we had experienced it firsthand. In 2018, we were working with one of the large brands in India and they had like 550 plus stores across India and they wanted to implement their OmniChannel solution. So basically they wanted to mobilize the inventory across all their stores for their online customers and vice versa. And they were already live with their Ecom website and it was on one of the popular CMSs. The website was just not stable. They had asked us to help with maintaining that website and just to scale it up for a really bigger marketing campaign. But given the nature of it, that CMS, there were just too many plugins installed there and there were just too many custom code bases out there and almost every piece of plugin had access to the entire platform and they could influence, any plugin could influence any part of the website. It was very complicated. So we broke it down into smaller modules and we gave each of the modules a single responsibility and it was hosted and maintained independent of the other modules. So that single responsibility module really worked well and we were able to scale the website to almost like 20X or 25X of the traffic that they were experiencing earlier. So in fact, I do remember that once we had broken down all the modules and actually it was the headless architecture, then the sales had resulted into almost like a 40% jump overnight. And we were pretty excited with the success of this new architecture and that is how the CartMax was born and we later developed it. So if the question comes of building the software in-house, I suggest you speak to your developers and talk about headless architecture. There are so many, every business has just so many data points that are being generated every day, every minute, every hour that you need to ingest, analyze and basis that forms some opinion or take some action. So technology can help you maintain some consistency here. It can help you bridge that knowledge gap. At CartMax we have developed a virtual assistant that leverages the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence and which is able to ingest 300 plus data points in your business from across multiple departments and different events and it is able to analyze it and then it is able to give you a very coherent picture of how your business is doing. And the better part is if you ask it, it can also take some actions. So let's see an example. Hi Max. Prakash, how do you do? I am doing good. How is the sales going? Looks good so far. You have received 6,820 orders with total revenue of 6.1 crore in the last seven days. However, the RTO has increased to 25% in this period against our average monthly RTO of 18%. Can you figure out a reason for this high RTO? Okay. I found these 62% of RTOs have come from Maharashtra in the past seven days. I also see the PIN code serviceability list was not updated in this period. There has also been some delayed dispatches reported that you may want to check back with the warehouse people. Okay. I'd like to ask Vishal, the operations head, to check it with the logistics partners. Yes. I have sent an email to Vishal and I have copied you on the email too. Okay. Sounds good. Thanks. Thanks. Have a nice day. So what resources do you need to maintain your e-commerce website? Do you need to maintain a team of developers to run it? Like do you need a developer? Do you need a UI developer? Do you need a theme builder? What sort of resources do you need? Okay. See, over the course of years, the software has become so easy to use and so intuitive that usually you do not require very high tech skills to play with it, to operate it. Right. Primarily because the software has become so intuitive to use that you do not need any specialized skills to run these pieces of software. And so has been the case of e-commerce websites as well. So if you need to maintain a team of developers just to keep your website going, then perhaps you should evaluate your options. I will give you a very short demo of how easy it has become to build your e-commerce website. You just do not need any technical skills. If you are familiar with word excel powerpoints, if you can just drag and drop simple things, then that is all these skills that you need. So you have to be on a relentless quest to make your business more efficient with whatever resources you have. And the good news is technology can help you there. So the bottom line is kill the inefficiency before it kills your business. Now everything that we have discussed today in this session. We have put it in a single document for your easy reference and it is available at cartmax.in slash efficiency. Thank you. So with the boom in B2C, do you see a lot of scope for many India focused e-commerce builder startups, you know, like Shopify? Right. Right. So, see, Shopify, yes, they are focusing into the India market too now. But I think they have got a little late because there are a number of India specific problems that are not solved yet. Right. Okay. So, for example, see, most of these, you know, D2C builders were actually built from scratch in the Western market. Right. Therefore, many of the India specific use cases are not solved by them yet. For example, one very common use case is that, you know, in India, the people are not very email friendly, like, but in order to, you know, do any transaction at each of these sites, they actually force you to, you know, share your email address and then create your account and then, you know, complete that transaction. So that is not very user friendly. I mean, think of the higher age groups and the elderly people, right? So, yes, these solutions are still on a journey to solve for a number of India specific use cases. Yes, we have solved such use cases at Command Max as well. Okay. All right. All right. The next question is, what is more important for D2C businesses, logistics, easy returns of payments? I think there, we can't pick and choose one of these two, both are equally important because it is very important to give your customers a very seamless experience. So logistics is important. And at the same time, you know, the automated handling of return or refund is also equally important. Right. So actually, see your customers are expecting the same level of, same levels of experience that these marketplaces are giving them already, right? So D2C brands can't be behind that, while, you know, when they are surfing the customers through their own channel, you need to meet the expectation that is already set by, or the benchmark already set by the marketplaces. Ultimately, it is a customer experience that needs to be done now, you know, be it, you know, your return payment, everything has to make the customer experience supreme either. Right. Right. The other question that we have got is that in terms of technology, what is missing in India's D2C despite the boom? Sorry, despite? Despite the boom in D2C, in terms of technology, do you think anything is still, any pieces still missing and needs to be kind of plugged? Right. See, for most of the D2C brands, whenever they start their income journey, and when they deliberate over the technology that they want for their platform, one question definitely comes in that is build versus buy, whether you should build it in-house from scratch or using some of this software, or should you just buy or, you know, rent a already hosted platform like software like Shopify, okay? So see, as a rule of the thumb, the buy option works for most of the businesses, okay, because you do not want to invest into technology because that investment, once you invest into the technology to build your application, then you will have to remain invested in it for a very long period of time, right? So and that will also use use of your management bandwidth, your focus bandwidth, right? So usually the buy option is the best, go for SaaS. And second, whenever you are evaluating any of these platform, whether it is off the self-hosted applications like Magento or WooCommerce, et cetera, or whether it is SaaS, just think if it is headless or not, right? Because, see, the current architecture of at least the self-hosted applications, it was built like a decade and a half ago, right? So we call it the legacy architecture. Now, in order to not in e-commerce, there's just too many moving pieces in terms of your technology, okay? And these need to be separated from each other. So speak to your developer about the headless architecture, if they can build it on that. Later, it will save you a lot of headache when you would really want to scale your business. And I think with SaaS coming in and the cost going down, it's become much easier now, would you say, sir? Yes, yes, I agree to that. All right, Prakash, thank you so much for being with us here today. It was a pleasure to host you. And as you said that, you know, it's a journey for D2C and other businesses. And if one can build a headless sort of architecture, because that is easier going forward. And, you know, we have to chuck legacy and start from the scratch. That's what I think is the crux of your talk today. Thank you so much for joining us here. And thank you for being here. And we will see you in the presentation. Thank you.