Winning customers, the Flipkartway
How the home grown e-commerce player is tweaking its user interface to accommodate a diverse customer portfolio
Boxing customers into age and income classifications to predict their purchase behaviour is an imperfect science, to say the very least. But in India, even more so, given the frustrating diversity that retailers encounter in tastes within a demographic, location or income category. At Flipkart, a team of data scientists has been trying to address this challenge, making patterns out of the chaotic jumble of data points dropping into their system every day. The result: a shelf full of labels that flip in and out of screens, based on purchase behaviour rather than geography or income. Or in terms of the prevalent terminology, a more fluid and intuitive user interface (UI) that does not pitch iPhones to a consumer just because she belongs to the right age group.
Speaking at the sidelines of the TiE Global Summit last week Ram Papatla, VP Product Management, Flipkart said, “It is important to understand what kind of emotional and functional elements the brand should evoke for every consumer. For a tier-II customer the quality and affordability is more important. For a metro brands across the spectrum of consumer it might be speed, digital services are seeking to brand and reviews.” In the ever separate themselves from the intensifying struggle for market clutter. That is also why many dominance, every customer are betting heavily on voice, the counts and the e-tailer is entertainment platform Zee5 as increasingly tinkering with new well as Amazon Prime Music UI trends. He added that customer have introduced services that profiling based on location, can be used via voicecommands. gender or lifestage is not used given the complex customer “We hope to change the way spread across the country. customers interact with the There are nuances to customer music world with this voice behaviour, based control,” said Sahas understanding which could Malhotra, director Amazon help one e-commerce brand Music India at the launch of its stand apart from another. At the services. summit, Prashan Agarwal, COO As Flipkart penetrates further of music streaming app Gaana into non-metro regions, the discussed the need to understand focus on UI becomes even more the many realities of the critical. There are many first Indian market while designing time users who need handholding. UI. “While there is a need to “They won’t say a accommodate native search white shirt with black polka queries into the broad framework dots. The query will just be it is paramount that we white shirt and we have to work not go into this with big town to understand what this customer biases. One cannot profile customers is looking for beyond that by location. Another in terms of gender, occasion, thing to keep in mind is that material etc,” said Papatla. The while the Jio wave has brought underlying UI programme then internet to many, connectivity goes on to understand their will still be an issue in far flung exact requirement and narrow areas, so there is a need to their search through what they design UI which works smoothly call “conversation”. in low bandwidth.” Papatla adds that UI trends This is true not just for ecommerce will undergo players, changes UI rapidly is how with a lot of research resources dedicated to streamline customer experience globally with voice inputs likely to replace soft keyboards in near future. “This is an experimental phase. I don’t think anybody has a silver bullet. The basic idea is to understand customer intent through any possible way be it through voice command or even pictures,” he said.
The aim of every UI is to deliver an experience that keeps customers coming back for more. And at Flipkart that has been the goal of the team behind its newly launched grocery services (it has started with a limited trial for users in Bangalore). With the likes of Big Basket and Amazon expanding their presence in groceries, Flipkart wanted to make a mark. Bringing about a more user friendly interface required Flipkart to change its usual buying model where users spend some time and a number of visits to make large purchases. Grocery required a faster, single visit approach which was attained by providing an app-in-app experience.
“So the entire UI has been changed to mimic front of the aisle and back of the aisle which are very typical to buying grocery. They are tailored for the primary household decision maker who is usually a woman. The entire experience is built such that you can add ten things in the basket within few seconds,” said Papatla.
While Flipkart doesn’t share reports on the amount of data collected from users, industry estimates indicate that the platform gets almost 100 terabytes of data from consumer analytics daily. All of this data is put to use in profiling customers beyond “metro single female” and “non-metro married male” types of generic classifications.
A key initiative for making new users feel comfortable is to understand what they are likely to buy, be it millenials with disposable incomes or users from smaller cities looking for quality products. “There is no point showing them iPhone X on the home screen if they cannot afford it,” Papatla said.