 Good morning. I am so glad this conversation happened right now according to Wogue as well as some vague magazine articles. This is when people are the most alert like properly caffeinated people. So this is the perfect time to be having this conversation with Himanshu who is across the CEO of a company which has had to stay on its toes to stay part of, you know, the great Indian retail conversation. So thank you first of all so much for speaking to us. And, you know, of course there's been Snapdeal and there's been Snapdeal 2.0. So would you first like to talk about what that process has been like? Yeah. Shantanu, yeah, that's an interesting question and before we before we start off, how many people here have shopped on Snapdeal in the last one year? Can you raise your hands? Yeah. Now that's interesting because you'll find probably three, four hands. Yeah. Now that's Snapdeal 2.0 and I'll describe that for you. Yeah. Essentially, Snapdeal, the first version was all about being a marketplace for everything, everywhere, all at once. So we were everywhere with every category and the fuel there was in terms of I think the lady mentioned before that that at one click you could get anything that you could think of. So we had stored everything and of course you came to you at the cheapest possible price. So that was the earlier version of Snapdeal. What we are now creating and I don't want to go into the history and bore you with what caused us to move into Snapdeal 2.0, but I'll just take you to 2.0. So Snapdeal 2.0 is about creating value lifestyle destination for Bharat. And this is an interesting one because just a few statistics for everyone as to why this is interesting. So give or take depending on what data source you are looking at there are around 800 to 900 million people with internet access in India. There are give or take another approximately out of that 200 to 250 million people who have transacted online. So they have shopped on e-commerce platforms in some form or the other. And the interesting part of this is that out of this 250 million which has shopped on any of the e-commerce platforms roughly around 50% of this is the value segment. And 50% is our people who came in onto e-commerce and internet long back. People like you and us who probably have been on e-commerce for 10 years, 15 years, 18 years, 20 years depending on age and everything else. The other 50% is the value segment. Large number of these have come in post the geo revolution. Quite a lot of them have come in during the COVID phase. But the interesting part is not this half in half. The interesting part is that the out of the 800 million, the next 200 million e-commerce shoppers will largely all come from the value segment. And if you think about it, it will be clear to you that the more well to do segments whoever had to be on e-commerce is already on e-commerce. Only it's the birth rate and people moving into adulthood. That's the percentage. It will not grow much. Almost 90, 95% of the next 200 million shoppers or 250 million shoppers would come from the value segment. Now, therefore, we embarked on this journey of creating this destination for value lifestyle. In the value lifestyle segment, the quality of merchandise is very poor. So how do you make value lifestyle destination with good quality merchandise for the for the consumers? And how do you make it of appeal to people who have got not too much money with them? In fact, very little money with them. And that's really discovering the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid and how you can scale it up in a profitable manner. So that's the Snapdeal 2.0. And like we discussed this, everyone talks about Amazon right now. But the thing is, especially in a country like India, Bharat is its own segment. And it perhaps like far outweighs the India segment like the Snapdeal or sorry, the Flipkart or the Amazon. And so could you describe the typical Snapdeal customer like what they're looking for and how you sort of looking for that and have them in mind? So very interesting. I think the thing is that whether you since you named two of them, so Amazon and Flipkart, do they cater to the Bharat customers? Yes, they reach out to the Bharat customers. Do they service those pin codes? Yes, they do. So what's the difference? The difference is that the experiences on all the platforms are created for metro audiences. The experiences are created for people in this room. The experiences are not created for the Bharat customer. It is an inbuilt assumption that the aspiration of the Bharat customer is identical to the needs of the metro customers. And only the price range is different. This is the assumption. And this is actually not true. I'll give you illustrations of this, right? If you were to look at our audience, our audience is one is very clear. One is in terms of vernacular versus English, but that's okay. That is quite understandable. But the more important one is that a lot of them are reasonably new to e-commerce shopping. They struggle to fill the address page. One quick statistic for you on our platform, 70% of the purchases take place without anybody keying in a search term or filtering or using any of the filters. So 70% without using filter, without using search term. What does that mean? That essentially means that they're relying on the homepage feed and they're relying on the tabs. So go men, t-shirts, et cetera, et cetera. So you follow the tab. Now, this customer is quite different from the metro audiences who quickly want to reach and see what they want to see. Now, how do you make the assortment that Divya sees different from what Ramdeen sees? And how do you dynamically do that? So the role of data science in our case is significantly higher than the other platforms. What I show to you will make the difference between your buying or not buying. How do we handle you through the process? How do we enable you to fill up the address pages easily? Visuals are picture-led. The PDB pages are picture-led. Very little text and very easy text, no complicated terms. So there are lots and lots of different things that you do when you want to cater to. And of course price and assortment, which is a massive part of the whole thing. But everything else in terms of the experience is quite different for the Bharat customers compared to the customers that you see on other platforms which are largely being done for the metro audiences. The checkout pages are so complicated in the other platforms. But they're easy for people like us because we've been accustomed to that complication. But to the first-time customer it is complicated. Us is quite easy. It's meant for the Bharat consumer. And apkir is because you said like SAPT does do a lot of hand-holding and it takes first-time customers through this process. And so apkir is that a differentiator when it comes to you and say to an Amazon or even a Flipkart that because you have this in mind that you are aware of the difficulties. So is that why also that they sort of come towards you? So there are two or three reasons for that. One is of course as a brand name, Snapdale is extremely well-known. Like the others are well-known. So it becomes a natural magnet if you ask anybody to name three or four e-commerce sites across the country. We will feature in that list. So I think that's an advantage which comes in honestly not because of what we have done recently but because of the Snapdale 1.0 version. So that's a heritage that we have. But having said that, I think more and more people keep coming on to our app and site essentially because it's easy. If you are a first-time user just again another statistic which may be interesting for you. We have two categories of shoppers. Any platform would have. We all have repeat users which is called RTU in our terminology and FTU which is the first-time user on your platform. Now out of the FTUs on our platform 30 to 35% one third is first time ever on any e-commerce platform. First time ever they have not shopped on any e-commerce platform. Now this is completely different. What you need to create for them is therefore completely different from what you need to do if there are people who have shopped multiple times on a platform. And of course this is an emerging segment and it has its bright spots as well. So what do you see as the biggest advantages as well as perhaps some of the challenges for the segment? I think both the advantage and the challenges merge into each other and I'll just illustrate to you why it does. Now in the lifestyle segment which is fashion, footwear, BPC products, functional merchandise, household products etc. The quality of the merchandise at the low end of the spectrum is not good in India. This is the reality. It is patchy. In fact it does not even compare with other emerging economies. We are quite poor in terms of the quality. Now the person who is buying that merchandise a t-shirt let's say at 200 rupees or 300 rupees or a polo at 350 rupees or a 400 rupees is looking for him that 200, 300, 400 rupees is a hell of a lot of money and is looking for good quality merchandise. And therefore our merchandise range that we have is very curated. It's curated with marketplace sellers but you get to see only good quality merchandise. We actually off-board anything which is not good quality. The important second part therefore is that we only have relevant price range. In our case for example if you go and hunt for t-shirts your story will start at 199 and you will get over at 799. You don't get to see 2999, 3999, 4999 confusing you because that's not our customer. That's also one of the reasons that many of you and only 3-4 hands went up. It does not appeal to you. We largely don't have any brands because we operate at the end where there are only labels. So we curate those labels. We curate the quality of the labels and the assortment and make the experience well. Now this is a challenge but it's also competitive advantage because it's difficult to carry out. And the other one which is very difficult to crack is at 400, 400 rupees average selling price ASP as we call it where you have mostly COD orders, cash-on delivery orders, 85-90% are cash-on delivery orders and therefore undelivered returns are high because it's not paid for. How do you make money while doing this? Now this itself when you solve this is both a massive challenge and also an inbuilt mode because it's difficult to do. Yeah but it's a huge challenge but also the numbers are there because as much as we'd like to pretend to we're still a very small part of the average, perhaps you aren't as aware of. And so I mean in snappy's insistence where you have concentrated on the market. So how do you help tech-assistant people who like you said people who are coming on to the person. How do you sort of hand, you said hand-holding but how does that process actually work? So in different ways like for example to a lot of customers who are from Bharat there's a lot of anxiety whether the packets will get delivered or not. Now they can't easily read the text messages SMS or WhatsApp. That's a reality. So we have an audio message that goes. They're very accustomed to audio messages saying that your packet will be delivered tomorrow. Now this is not the exact text I'm just giving you the gist of what it does. So it essentially gives you that in an audio just illustrations of how this has been done. Similarly for example on the platform when we also had the same thing at a point of time where you had address field 1, address field 2, pin code, town, state and so on and so forth. Now then we figured out that customers struggle. How are you what does address field 1 mean? What does 2 mean? All this gets very complicated. So we actually merged everything. So if you go to our thing you will find there's just one field. They can write the address they want. What we do is we actually if they are struggling with that also there's a prompt. So if you click that you get advice how to fill it. And if you click another button there you can get you will get an instant call back. How to fill to help you very interestingly we allow the customers to fill this and wherever our algo determines that this address looks difficult to read with what they've said there's a call that goes to the customer and our agent actually rewrites the address. So just illustrations on how this experience on everything the images are large. The text is very easy and very little text. There is not too much of text. There's very little text. Now these are illustrations but the biggest one is how do I show the assortment to that person which is relevant for him. That's where we have worked for years on training our algos machine learning etc. We have a fantastic data science team of making it extremely super relevant at an individual level to that customer. And you know now that you've got this may I say data set in place and the thing is there are still three to four hundred million Indians who are going to come online and so here obviously got so what else is that field coming up to engage with this new internet population that is going to come in for the first time. So could you elaborate on that. So it's an interesting one and there are two angles to that. One is the relevance of the platform which is how you will get organic traffic and the other one is of course customer acquisition, CAC whoever is familiar with that term CAC customer acquisition cost. Now without going into details it's very important because we want to be profitable to get both these right and both these require a lot of work actually. So the digital marketing team that we have is probably one of the finest and probably one of the most conjuced teams that you will ever find around. And it's built in their DNA because when you are going to sell a product at four hundred four and fifty rupees you need to make sure that you acquire them at a small number. Otherwise it will be unprofitable and you need to get them at scale you need to get a large number of them which is a completely different mechanism from actually acquiring customers at whatever CAC in large numbers. So the skill set is quite different and platform we discussed, platform to be more and more of appeal as we move forward. Great. And so is there anything else you would like to talk about? Snapple in particular which it's coming up with in the future. Yes. So one of the things that we have done is that we have also created a house of brands when we figured out that there's a problem with the value segment. So we figured out that we need to look at creating some of the range ourselves to get the quality in place and that's where another company which is a subsidiary of Snapple called Stellaro Brands was born which is a house of brands. We have a bunch of brands which we have on our platform and we also sell on third party marketplaces. So if you were to look at Ajiho or if you were to look at Amazon you will find these brands. Some of them are doing quite well there just a few months. So there's a brand called Rangita. So if you go on Ajiho you will find that it has actually made its way into first fold second fold of the discovery there organically. So it's scaling up quite well. We have a large team which is from the physical world which makes these brands. So we have buyers, we have planners, we have designers, we have sourcing people, we have full content team. We have a large QC team to cater to this. So we have got a house of brands which is called Stellaro Brands. We have got six, seven brands as of now which we've all created from scratch over the last 10 to 12 months and some of them have gone live in the last two, three months on some of these platforms doing quite well. So that's the other interesting part which was a discovery that we were trying to solve this problem at the mass level. And it's interesting that there was this pivot for Snapdeal from India to Bharat. And now I think as consumers we can only hope that you pivot back to India as well. So that's a huge opportunity. And in fact the answer in many ways is known to us when I requested and I knew that hardly any very few hands will go up. That's a huge opportunity. We need to solve this. As of now we don't have a solve because the platform requirements, the need, the interface is quite different from the Bharat consumer custom compared to the audience that we see here. And therefore while people say India and Bharat are the same, they are not the same. It's quite different from each other. They're not the same at all. For us it'll be quite a challenge to actually start catering to the audience that's sitting here. No, I'm sure there'll be a lot of players that need to come into play to sort of bridge that gap. But I'm sure Snapdeal will be one of them. So thank you so, so much. Thank you, Shantani. Pleasure talking to you. Thank you.