YouSaid · the spoken record

Kunal Bahl

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58
first
2016-05-05
most recent
2016-05-05
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1
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podcast

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  1. “I think it's when you have such a fragmented supply side where no single brand accounts for a very large percentage of sales in any category, then automatically you need to have theoretically infinite assortment. Because if you want to offer broad selection, you can't offer it across 10 brands. You will need to have literally thousands of brands across each category. None of those are really big brands. They are more like labels. But if you don't know what's going to sell, how do you buy it in advance?”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, absolutely. I think the Indian market is evolving much more similarly to the Chinese market than the US market. The US went very quickly from C to C to B2C. In India, we've got straight to B2C, but marketplace models as compared to the first party inventory ownership model.”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And it's very similar to China, don't you agree? Because China has also huge percentage of organized retail and majority is unorganized. And Alibaba sort of did that with Daobao and Tmall, where they helped sort of, you know, I would, you know, people almost say instead of going from unorganized to organized, they actually went directly to a marketplace model that really helped bring a lot of the innovation online.”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Supply side as well because there's no organized retail, people don't have access to one channel of distribution. Even when you're making a great product, you spend 80 to 90 percent of your energy just distributing that product city by city by city, which is a problem that marketplaces are solving in India.”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yes, every small town will have many, many organized stores where you'll get different brands, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So as a consumer, you have access to far more selection of products. Secondly, also on the supply side, the penetration of brands into what people buy is immensely high in the US. Whereas when you look at a market like India, especially in things like women's fashion, home products, et cetera, there are very few brands and people still rely on local companies to buy all these products, which means at least when we were working on building a marketplace in India, it was acutely fragmented both on the supply as well as the demand side. Consumers could not get access to what they wanted to buy. I myself grew up in a pretty small town in India. And I remember, you know, even to buy something like shirts, you had to travel six hours away to a bigger city and buy shirts. That's how acute the problem is on consumer side in India. As a result, on the side,”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “A good comparison there is in US and fashion, we tend to buy a lot of brands. And in India, you don't have many brands. Most of the purchase is actually local brands. You go to the nearest mom and pop store.”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, one of the interesting things here to me, and I'm thinking about what played out with WeChat in China, is that what made the transaction model so popular is that WeChat was essentially providing a way for small business owners to create a storefront, like essentially build a website without having to build a website. So as part of the limitation here that regular small and medium-sized businesses in India, the local businesses, besides the fact that they lack distribution, they just don't have the skill set or the access to be able to build their own website and just automatically, because you could have a website on the internet that would potentially gain that distribution over time.”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, so I think in Amazon in the early days, there was primarily books, and then they expanded it to other electronics devices. Apparel and fashion and accessories is still a big category, but it was not the number one launchpad for Amazon. So it's very interesting to see how being a marketplace in India, fashion is quite popular.”

    2016-05-05 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source