India Country Guide 2018 Cross-Border Trading Report A report researched and compiled by IMRG, supported by
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India Country Guide 2018Cross-Border Trading ReportA report researched and compiled by IMRG, supported by
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Contents 2
About India 4
India overview
The internet in India
The Retail Landscape in India 9
Retail in India
Online retail in India
Summary
Indians as online shoppers 15
Size of Prize
Motivations
Summary
How to reach Indian online shoppers 19
Channel Choice
Marketing to Indians
Search & Content
Summary
Practicalities: legal, payment, logistics 24
Legal issues
Payment
Logistics
Summary
INTRODUCTION
India is a country full of contradictions. On one hand, it might be very familiar indeed: as a reader, there’s a pretty good chance that your website is at least partly built by Indian software developers, some of whom you know personally. On the other hand, suggest ‘India’ in a meeting, and you’ll hear words such as ‘exotic’ or ‘bizarre’ amongst the first responses from your audience. This Passport is a guide to picking your way through the contradictions of India, and of Indian ecommerce, to enable you to decide if it’s a country worth targeting, and if so, how to do it.
It starts with the basics. On the one hand, India has 1.25 billion people. On the other hand, not all of them can read, of those that can, not all can read English, and of those proficient in English, not all are likely to be able to afford your products. The practical reality is that there’s a target market roughly the same size as Germany with roughly the same wealth as Poland, with ecommerce growing attractively, but probably not explosively, strongly by about +20% per year and expected to continue to do so for a long time to come, and with growth in sales of international brands growing well ahead of this average.
It explains the key challenge. On the one hand, the Indian IT industry probably builds many of the world’s biggest websites. On the other hand, unlike pretty much any other country in the world, India is taking active steps to prevent e-Commerce from out-competing the millions of small shops that employ 8% of the country’s workforce… and voters.
The result is ever-changing regulatory restrictions that continue to prevent India from seeing the spectacular growth in ecommerce experienced in some other emerging markets, and exert a critical influence on your choice of potential routes to market. However an important side effect of these same changes is that the big marketplaces – Flipkart and its fashion-centric subsidiaries Myntra and Jabong, Snapdeal, and Amazon.in - which currently dominate Indian ecommerce are becoming much hungrier for, and therefore more accommodating to, the needs of your brand. The marketplaces route into India is worth much more serious consideration than you might normally give it for most countries… they aren’t (yet) Alibaba but the direction of travel is becoming clear.
It describes what Indian shoppers are looking for and how to speak to them. Think your current trading calendar is complicated, with Black Friday, Xmas & Boxing Day, Back-to-School and a few others? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Indians shop at festivals and for family events, and there are an awful lot of festivals, varying by region, celebrated by extended families spread across the country.
And lastly of course, you’ll need to navigate India’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, and rather variable infrastructure, to actually get your goods to your customers. The key issues, such as consumer and data protection law, payments, choice of parcel-delivery channels, are discussed. So are its peculiar-sounding import customs and duties tariffs: anyone for CEX… or maybe you’d prefer CESS?
In summary, India isn’t an easy target. It is, however, a very interesting one: there are plenty of target customers in several rapidly growing demographic segments; they are hungry for western goods and brands; and both local and international competition is relatively weak; there is steady and continuous growth in ecommerce supported by ambitious long term forecasts; English is the language of commerce; the general internet landscape is the familiar one of Facebook and Google; there is a real opportunity to quickly gain first-mover advantage in your segment for your brand.
India is indeed a country full of contradictions. But it’s also a country full of customers.
4 5
Economics
Measured in GDP per head, India is not a wealthy country (Figure 2), and you might perhaps wonder why you might target it at all. GDP growth is forecast to be 7.6% in the next couple of years, but although this is a rate we’d probably be very happy with at home, it isn’t going to transform India into a highly developed economy in the near future. Per head averages, however, are not the best way to look at India.
GDP per Capita comparison
USA
10,000
0
20,000
30,000
40,000
70,000
60,000
50,000
Germany UK France Poland Russia Morocco India
Figure 2 - GDP per Capita comparisons3
Even if they are literate, only a small proportion of its population can realistically afford what you are likely to be selling. Over half of all households have an annual income of less than £2,000 per year, and even the most optimistic forecasts predict less than 5% will have an income equivalent to the UK average (approximately £26,5004) by 2020 (Figure 3).
Distribution of Annual Household Income
<£2k
£2-4.5k
£4.5-11k
£11-23k
>£23k
50%
30%
14%
14% 2%
Figure 3 - Distribution of Household Income5
3 International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook (October-2016)4 ONS5 BCG, The Tiger Roars, Feb 2012
ABOUT INDIA
India overviewDemographics
There are a lot of people in India: 1,266 million of them1. Not all of them are potential customers for your ecommerce offer. To start with, not all of them are literate in any language, let alone English (Figure 1):
100,000,000 Illiterate Female
120,000,000
140,000,000
India: Demographics by Age and Literacy
80,000,000
60,000,000
40,000,000
20,000,000
15-1
9
20-2
4
25-2
9
30-3
4
35-3
9
40-4
4
45-4
9
50-5
4
55-5
9
60-6
4
65-6
9
70-7
4
75-7
9
80-8
4
85-8
9
90-9
4
95+
0
Illiterate Male
Literate Female
Literate Male
Figure 1 - Indian Demographics by Age and Literacy2
Literacy levels are higher amongst the young, a demographic much more likely to be online: 83% of 20-24 year olds are literate, compared to only 43% of 65-69 year olds.
Indian demographics, including its national census, almost always make the distinction between urban and rural populations – it really is almost two separate countries in terms of lifestyle. Roughly one third of the population is defined as urban, which is currently where internet usage is concentrated.
1 CIA world factbook, 20162 Census of India 2011, www.censusindia.gov.in
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Demographics of internet access
Published data points on actual numbers of internet users vary, but the general consensus appears to be about 20-25% of the population currently. This is forecast to increase rapidly, with much of the growth coming from rural users, who by implication will almost certainly be using low bandwidth mobile-based connections: Figure 4.
Numbers of Indian Internet Users
Mill
ions
Rural
Urban
2013
100
0
200
300
400
700
600
500
2014 2015 2016 2017FC 2018FC
Figure 4 - numbers of internet users, urban vs rural7
More specific demographics are also changing rapidly. In 2013, only 27% of internet users were female, but this is forecast to become 34% by 2018; similarly 60% of users were under 25 by 2013, forecast to become 46% by 2018.
As internet usage grows, use of non-English content is forecast to increase:
“Currently over 200 million Indians are online and most of them are already proficient in English. We want to ensure that the next 300 million who are not proficient in English find the internet just as easy to use”8 say Google, who have a vernacular language initiative ongoing.
Usage
What are all these users doing? This is a topic where that urban/rural divide is particularly stark (Figure 5). Even as internet access has rolled out to rural areas, this hasn’t translated into much online shopping; meanwhile enthusiasm for online shopping accelerates apace in the towns and cities.
Key uses of the internet, change 2013-2015
Email & Messaging2015 URBAN
2015 RURAL
2015 BLENDED
Other Social Networking
Entertainment
Retail
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Figure 5 - percentage of time spent on various online activities 9
7 Based on data from IAMAI, the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which mainly comprises many big players such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay, IBM, Flipkart, Ola and LinkedIn.
8 Managing Director Google India, Rajan Anandan, Nov 2014 9 Source: Comscore Media Metrix 2013, IMRB I-Cube 2015
Realistically, you are probably targeting just the top two income groups, roughly 6% of the overall population. But… 6% of India’s population is still equivalent to a country the size of Germany. Moreover, that 6% are almost all literate in English6 which in turn gives them a global perspective and an appetite for global brands.
Seasonality
India is big enough to encompass multiple climate zones. From a practical perspective, there are (sort of) four seasons, but if your trading calendar is based on an Autumn-Winter (cold and wet) and Spring-Summer (warm and dry) seasonality then it’s probably going to need some modification for India. The key factor is the monsoon, which affects most of the key population centres, and happens in what in the UK we would think of as summer. For most of the rest of the year, much of India is rather dry.
Summary• There are a lot of people in India! Based on average statistics such as GDP/head,
they are rather poor, with literacy levels of only c65% in key age groups such as 30-40 year olds
• However, general “average” statistics about India are unhelpful when considering it as a cross-border ecommerce prospect. There is significant inequality of wealth distribution, with around 6% of the population – about 80M people – likely to be plausible targets
• The plausibly addressable market is comparable in size to Germany and in wealth to Poland, and is growing steadily as India grows wealthier
• Seasonality in India should be borne in mind. Promoting your spring-summer catalogue just when the monsoon starts to pour down is unlikely to be an optimal trading calendar
THE INTERNET IN INDIA
Absolute basicsIndian domain names end in “.in” and are used in a manner rather consistent with the usage of “.uk” – companies are typically “.co.in” for example.
It’s easy to register an Indian domain name. What isn’t so easy is to use it for retailing to Indian consumers. There are extensive restrictions, which we’ll cover later in this report in the section on FDI (foreign direct investment). Suffice to say here that you certainly are not going to be setting up yourdomain.co.in and mirroring your home site on it with some minor localisation changes.
6 BCG, [email protected], Jan 2015
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THE RETAIL LANDSCAPE IN INDIA – OFFLINE AND ONLINE
Retail in IndiaIn this section we take a short look at the overall retail landscape in India, before moving on to focus in more detail on specifically online retail later in this section and for the remainder of this report.
General retail landscape
Unlike almost any other country in the world, India retailing is dominated by small stores and street stands, known as the “unorganised” sector: 92% of all retailing by value falls into this sector12. A secondary distinction is made between single-brand and multi-brand retailing, and until 2012 overseas investment was not permitted in multi-brand retailers. The result has historically been fragmentation. Organised retailing is currently growing at around double the rate of unorganised (30% compared to 16%13), but that still leaves it with a long way to go.
Total retail sales were approximately USD $463bn by the end of 2015 (Figure 7):
India Retail Sales (USD Bn)
USD
Bn
02013
370
415
463
2014 2015
50
100
160
200
250
300
350
400
450
500
Figure 7 - Total retail sales in India 14
12 Associated Chamber of Commerce, India (ASSOCHAM), Jan 201513 ibid14 Euromonitor 2016
Mostly they are doing all this from mobile devices (Figure 6), over mobile connections: the fixed-line infrastructure in India was very under-developed at the point when mobile phones began to appear, which in turn removed many of the incentives to invest in it. There are less than 18M fixed line broadband connections in India for its 200M+ internet users10.
Device usage
Tablet
Desktop/Laptop
Basic Mobile
Smart Mobile
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
Figure 6 - device usage of internet users 11
Summary• There are a lot of internet users in India. It currently ranks second only to
China in terms of absolute numbers of users
• There is a big gender skew, with only about a third of users currently being female (although those female users who are online spend more time there)
• Most of these users are accessing via mobile devices over mobile connections. By western standards, these are often quite slow. Any potential site implementation targeted at Indian users should plan for somewhat slower connections
• Time spent accessing retail sites has historically been low, but this is changing quite rapidly in urban areas; rural use of online shopping remains low
• There are regulatory barriers to implementing retail ecommerce in India; simply registering a domain and localising your existing site is almost certainly illegal (see later in this report)
10 Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Aug 201611 Google Consumer Barometer 2016
10 11
In practice, the organised retail sector targets exactly those consumers most relevant as targets for ecommerce: the wealthiest 6-10% of the population, typically living in the biggest cities which are also most accessible for home-delivery (see Logistics later in this report). When considering India as an ecommerce target, therefore, it generally makes sense to consider only the organised retail sector as representing a real opportunity. So, for example, if you are a non-Indian retailer or brand considering selling fashion in India, the total size of the addressable fashion sector is currently 28% (according to Figure 9) of the 8% of retail which is organised i.e. 28% x 8% x 463$Bn = approximately 10$Bn.
Top local retailers
A fragmented market, which has historically been restricted for foreign investment17, has resulted in a very unfamiliar (to non-Indians) landscape of top retailers (Figure 10):
RETAIL GROUP TRADING AS… ONLINE STORE?
Future Group
Pantaloons Yes
Fashion Station No
Brand Factory No
E-zone Yes
REI Agro Ltd. 6TEN Yes, but not functional at the time of this assessment
Fabindia Textiles, home furniture, apparels, and jewellery Yes
RPG Group
CEAT Tyres No
Zensar Technologies No
KEC International Ltd. No
Tata Group
Westside No
Tanishq Yes
Titan Yes
Skinn Yes
Reliance Retail
Reliance Mart Yes
Reliance Footprint No
Reliance Trends No
Reliance Jewellery No
K Raheja Corp GroupShoppers Stop Yes
Crossword Yes
Aditya Birla Group Louis Phillipe No
Gitanjali
Jewellery stores Some have online stores, some don’t
Watches No
Apparel No
Chain stores No
Figure 10 - top local retailers18
Conspicuously, and reflecting the current maturity and limitations of ecommerce in India, many of these top retailers do not yet operate an online store.
17 Although there are fewer restrictions today (excluding ecommerce – see below), foreign-majority-owned retailers are still obliged to source 30% of their sales in India18 IBEF 2016, supplemented by local research performed specifically for this report
India retail by category
The overall category split of retailing in India is shown in Figure 8.
Overall category breakdown of retail in India
60%
11% 8%
6%
5%
10%
3%
4%
3%
Food and grocery Food serviceOther
Jewellery
Apparel
Consumer electronics
Mobile and telecom
Pharmacy
Figure 8 - Category split of overall Indian retail 15
However it should be remembered that this includes the dominant unorganised sector. It may well be more realistic to consider data for the organised sector only, as this probably more realistically defines the accessible market for an overseas retailer. This organised retail category breakdown is shown in Figure 9.
Category breakdown of organised retail in India
Apparel and accessories28%
19%15%
15%
9%
14%
Food and groceries
Consumer durables
Personal products
Food services and entertainment
Other
Figure 9 - category breakdown of organised retail in India 16
15 India Internet, Goldman Sachs, May 201516 ASSOCHAM, Jan 2015
12 13
These sites were powering ahead, based heavily on a model of offering significant discounts compared to the general market, when the Indian government stepped in and changed the rules again, to heavily restrict the use of promotional discounting. Given that low pricing has traditionally been the engine of growth for ecommerce in every country, this has put a short-term damper on overall ecommerce growth in India 23, but this is expected to recover strongly once the market is reoriented to absorb these changes. (Moreover the secondary driver of growth in markets such as India – the use of ecommerce by consumers to access to a broader range of brands and goods – still remains strong.)
It is particularly good news for brands and retailers considering using these marketplaces as channels to enter India, the same change in regulations also restricted any marketplace to making no more than 25% of its sales from a single seller. It is believed that both Amazon and Flipkart were previously relying heavily on a large seller that they in practice owned to “work-around” the FDI rules.
The effect of this change is to make them hungry for additional, larger, marketplace participants. If you are a brand with strong international pedigree or significant potential appeal to (especially younger) India consumers, then your negotiating position is strong. It is also likely that you can expect to see the active development of features and functionality on the leading marketplaces designed to make them more attractive as places to present your brand, and indeed this is already starting happen. Myntra, for example, already provide some basic shop-in-shop/brand-shop features, with more in the pipeline 24. 25
Size of ecommerce in IndiaThe overall size of retail ecommerce in India was estimated to be approximately USD $23bn in 2015 (Figure 11):
Retail Sales and Penetration of eCommerce
2013 2014 2015 2016E 2017F 2018F0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
0
0.2%
0.4%
0.6%
0.8%
1.0%
1.2%
1.4%
1.6%
Sales US$ Bn Penetration
Sale
s U
S$ B
n
% P
enet
rati
on o
f eC
omm
erce
Figure 11- ecommerce retail sales and penetration in India26
Recent growth has been strong at over 20% p.a. (considerably ahead of growth most more developed markets), and there are some spectacular forecasts for future growth – an estimate of a trillion dollars per year by 2030 was published by Amazon for example – but given the history of government intervention to inhibit some of the drivers which have fuelled spectacular growth in markets such as China, then it is probably wise to take a prudent view: growth is likely to be attractively solid but unlikely to be miraculous.
23 Indeed some sources claim that Indian e-commerce failed to grow at all in 2016 e.g. Marketpulse, April 201724 Interview with the author, June 201725 Amazon India declined to be interviewed for this paper, but in doing so observed that they didn’t wish to do so because they were
working on announcements for 2018…26 Sources: eMarketer, Forbes, and Goldman Sachs, 2016
ONLINE RETAIL IN INDIA
FDI RestrictionsIf you are reading this in a developed ecommerce market you will surely be aware that, prior to the current maturity-curve phase of competing on ever more convenient delivery or collection, the initial biggest impact of ecommerce on retailing was price transparency. Even now, Amazon makes no bones about aiming to have “lowest possible prices”19, and it is well known that it (along with many competitors) continuously price-scrapes competitor websites to maintain its price advantage. Given that retailing employs around 8% of the Indian workforce – and voters – in a mostly unorganised mom-and-pop-store sector, this is not a maturity trajectory that the India government has found attractive.
Moreover, unlike in China, where the advent of ecommerce has enabled millions of consumers to access goods previously unavailable due to the communist-legacy of generally poor retail coverage, there is extensive retail coverage in India, albeit small local retail “outdated” as seen through western eyes. The Indian government has preferred to put restrictions in place, aimed at preventing the likely ferocious competition with all these small local retailers by large price-driven ecommerce sites offering broader choice of products.
The mechanism that India has chosen to manage the impact of ecommerce has been restrictions on Foreign Direct Investment in ecommerce sites in India, built on a previous legacy of restricting FDI in traditional retail, partly lifted in 2012. The key rules can be extracted (from a morass of complexity) as:20
• FDI is not permitted in multi-branded B2C ecommerce websites (although it is permitted up to 100% in B2B sites)
• FDI is not permitted in single brand B2C ecommerce websites except that:
» FDI is permitted in single-brand B2C ecommerce websites associated with a brick-and-mortar store which sources at least 30% of its goods in India
» In theory, single-brand cross-border ecommerce is subject to the same restriction: you can sell into India from a non-Indian website provided 30% of what you sell is sourced in India. In actual practice, this is rather difficult to enforce
• FDI is now – the rules changed again in March 2016 – permitted up to 100% in C2C Marketplaces; in practice this simply regularised a situation that previously existed anyway21
» Nevertheless, to be a seller on an Indian marketplace, you will need a registered legal entity in India, or use the services of a third party who has such an entity and can use it to facilitate selling
Key marketplace sites in India
Given these restrictions, unsurprisingly retail ecommerce in India has been dominated by the marketplace model. The leading marketplaces, and associated approximate percentage of overall Indian ecommerce sales by GMV, are Amazon.in (15%), Flipkart (44%), Snapdeal (32%) 22. In addition to its main site, Flipkart also operates additional specialist marketplaces Myntra and Jabong in the fashion category, which may be preferred by brands because they are more respectful of the brand itself. At the time of writing, there appear to be questionmarks over the long-term future of Snapdeal, and it is likely to see its market share reduce. General consensus appears to be that the future lies in a straight fight: Amazon vs Flipkart + its subsidiaries.
19 Amazon 10-K filing, 201520 Nishith Desai, Jul 201521 Indian Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion, March 201622 Forbes, 2016. These market share figures are fiercely disputed by the marketplaces!
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INDIANS AS ONLINE SHOPPERS
Size of PrizeAverage cart sizes
Average cart sizes for purchases online are generally lower than in western markets, as might be expected, but in key categories such as clothing, not impossibly lower. It is always worth remembering that it is the wealthiest 6-10% of consumers who represent the online purchasing consumer-base in India (Figure 13):
Average Cart Sizes by Category
Books & Media
Toys & Gi�s
Personal Care/Beauty
So�ware
General Merchandise
Clothing & accessories
Consumer electronics
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
US$
Figure 13 - Average Online Cart Size by Category29
Demographics
Of those who use the internet to a significant extent and use it in English – a demographic inherently skewed towards the wealthiest and best educated – propensity to purchase by age group is shown in Figure 14.
Internet users propensity to purchase online by age
0
<25
25-34
35-44
45-54
55+
2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 14%A
ge G
roup
Figure 14 - internet users’ propensity to purchase online by age group30
29 Source: Mastercard 2015. Monetary-value data points have been kept in USD throughout this report, given the very volatile exchange rates for the British Pound at the time of writing
30 Google Consumer Barometer, 2015
Online retail category split
Category level data for online retail is somewhat elusive for India, but high level estimates are for the break-down are shown in (Figure 12):
Top Online Retail Categories in India
Apparel and accessories
Consumer electronics
Books
Beauty and personal care
Other
30%
15%
10%
11%
34%
Figure 12 - high level top online retail category split27
Summary• Indian retail is very fragmented. Over 90% is unorganised, although the
organised sector is now growing almost twice as quickly
• Local retailers often do not have very active ecommerce sites
• The ecommerce space is dominated by Marketplaces, especially Flipkart, (and its fashion-focussed satellites Myntra and Jabong28 ), Amazon and Snapdeal
» Changing regulations may mean these marketplaces become hungrier for retailers and brands to participate as sellers
» There are questionmarks over the sustainability of Snapdeal. The future may lie in a straight battle between Amazon India and Flipkart + subsidiaries
• There are extensive – and changing – restrictions imposed by the Indian government to try to ensure a level playing field for small local unorganised retailers competing against potential internet giants. These include
» Restrictions on foreign ownership of B2C sites » Restrictions on the use of promotions and discounts
• Retail ecommerce in India was estimated to have sale of approximately USD $23bn in 2016. The largest categories are consumer electronics and fashion/apparel
• Growth is attractively solid (20%+ YoY) but given the existing restrictions and history of government intervention, seems unlikely to follow the spectacular path of China
27 Payvision, 201528 Flipkart also recently acquired eBay India. (Source: Times of India, April 2017.) Notably this deal was partly funded by the Chinese giant
Tencent, owners of the powerhouses JD.com and Wechat
16 17
Barriers
Unsurprisingly, top barriers to online purchasing include returns (24%), payment methods (28%), concerns about security especially of payments (20%), and finding delivery charges off-putting (10%).34 All of these show declines over the last three years as Indian shoppers’ comfort with online shopping increases.
However they are all factors which are exacerbated by cross-border, and any cross-border proposition targeting India needs to take very clear steps to address these with potential purchasers.
General purchase motivations
While not specific to online transactions, it is insightful to examine Indian shoppers’ general motivations for purchasing, because these are often somewhat different to those in the west, especially the critical importance of festivals and family events in the purchasing calendar.35
Firstly consumer electronics, which show rather little variation compared with what might be expected in your home market (Figure 16):
Drivers for purchase: consumer electronics
As a gi�
Marriage event in family
Good deal
Home improvement
Upgrading product
Replacement
Lifestyle purchase
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Small home appliances
Home entertainment
Mobiles
Large home appliances
Computers
Figure 16 - reasons to make a consumer electronics purchase36
34 Source: Mastercard, 201535 Author’s note: I have once took on a consulting engagement to the (at that time) largest national Indian retailer of jewellery, planning
their ecommerce. It remains the most culturally interesting engagement I have ever done in 11 years of ecommerce consulting, because almost every purchase was driven by a specific local/religious festival (or events such as a marriage), each with its own very specific traditions and specific sets articles bought e.g. ‘gold for younger sisters’ etc.
36 BCG, The Tiger Roars, 2012
As might be expected in a fairly conservative country, inclination to purchase online is skewed towards those demographics which have grown up with the internet. Online purchase propensity drops off significantly in the silver-surfer segment.
Online purchase propensity shows little or no variation between genders, but this is in the context of internet usage by men being double that of women.
The fashion-oriented marketplace Myntra shared some demographic data for this report: 60%-40% male-female split, trending rapidly towards a more female audience (with its sister company Jabong already more female), and with 40% being in the 25-34 age group and a further 20% aged 20-24. 31
MOTIVATIONS
Why do Indians buy online?Indian shoppers claim, when surveyed, that factors like convenience are a key motivator for shopping online, and rank price somewhat further down (Figure 15):
Reasons to shop online
0%
Convenience
Easier than mail-order
Ratings & Reviews
Wide Choice
Price
Peer Behaviour
Entertainment
Necessity
10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%
Figure 15 - motivations for choosing to shop online32
In practice this is not necessarily borne out by the operating models of Indian online retailers. Until the recent changes in the laws to restrict the use of online discounts, the average investment by online retailers in discounts was a whopping 30% of revenues, with a further 12% spent on marketing and promotions. Unsurprisingly they traded at an average loss of 35% of turnover, hence the need for Foreign Direct Investment (see above) to sustain them through their initial growth cash-burn phase.33
Nevertheless, for a brand or retailer considering targeting India with products which are not locally available locally offline, the emphasis on choice and ratings, plus the demonstrable understanding Indians have that ecommerce represents an alternative to traditional mail-order, are all encouraging signs.
Anecdotal guidance suggests that Indian consumers will tolerate price mark-ups of around +30-35% in order to purchase locally (e.g. on marketplaces) compared to the perceived risk of buying from a non-Indian site.
31 Source: Myntra, June 201732 Source: Mastercard, 201533 Goldman Sachs, India Internet, May 2015
18 19
HOW TO REACH INDIAN ONLINE SHOPPERS
Channel choiceMarketplace
38 Forbes, 201639 Sourse: Myntra, June 201740 Such as the sponsor of this paper WeArePentagon41 http://www.nike.com/in/en_gb/
As we saw in section 2, more than 90% of relevant ecommerce in India takes place on marketplaces, primarily Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon 38. Moreover, as we saw in section 3, recent regulatory changes are likely to make these players hungry for additional sellers who will add volume, not to mention credibility, by selling well-known brands.
Neither Snapdeal nor Flipkart’s main site currently offer any of the brand-image-protecting features that are available on many other marketplaces. Both remain essentially C2C sites in terms of presentation, and the ownership of the relationship to the end-consumer is skewed away from the seller and towards the marketplace.
However, Flipkart owns and operates two marketplaces – Jabong and Myntra – which specifically target (generally younger and wealthier) fashion consumers. These are already seeing the potential in offering a more brand-conscious, more B2C-like, experience. Brands are reciprocating by starting to list their products on these sites. Major British fashion brands already actively selling include New Look, Dorothy Perkins and Next on Myntra, while Missguided are active on Jabong (Figure 18).
Other international brands, such as Mango, are already actively using marketplaces as their primary route into India, and have seen spectacular growth. International brand sales on the platform grew 145% between 2016-17, and are forecast to grow 80% in the next year. 39 This growth is a further contributor to driving the marketplaces to offer further brand-friendly features, including (in Myntra’s case) international-brand centric areas of the site planned for later this year.
Amazon, meanwhile, remains Amazon. It will be interesting to see if they feel driven towards a more TMall-like model in India, sacrificing some consumer-ownership and brand-visibility in exchange for sales growth. Given recent regulatory changes (see the FDI section), this seems a quite likely direction of travel.
Note that all sellers on Indian marketplaces are required to have a locally registered Indian entity. You cannot become a marketplace seller without one; it may therefore be necessary to seek the services of an appropriately registered partner.40
Local site?Unlike for most countries, a local site may well not be the best option, and may be technically illegal, unless you already source a significant proportion of your range in India. In practice this tends to restrict to those fashion/footwear brands with manufacturing facilities in India.
Nike, for example, has a local Indian site.41 Spend a few minutes browsing, and you’ll see that their hearts don’t really seem to be quite in it. Customer service is only open 5 days x 8 hours, for example, and shipping times are based on a warehouse only picking Monday-Friday with even the fastest express delivery option requiring a further 2 days.
By contrast, purchases of clothing and accessories, even amongst the wealthy educated professional demographic, are extraordinarily strongly driven by family events and festivals (Figure 17):
Motivations for clothing/accessories purchases
Festivals
Occasion e.g. Birthday
Weddings
New Season
Feel like it
Sale
Replace old clothes
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Poor Urban middle class Top 6%
Figure 17 - clothing/accessory purchase motivations37
If you are targeting Indian consumers in all but the most utilitarian of categories, it is essential to build your trading calendar around events such as festivals, and your marketing messaging around family-centric moments such as weddings and birthdays.
This is not the place to go into detail about the complexities of the festivals calendar in India; marketeers should bear in mind that India has multiple religions, and that even within these religions, festivals vary enormously by region, especially North India versus South India. In short, do your homework and target very carefully and tactfully. If you do this well it could have surprisingly high ROI, do it badly and you could easily give offence.
Summary• Average cart sizes are lower than in the west, but not impossibly lower in key categories
such as fashion; it’s the wealthiest Indians who are buying online
• Silver surfers are a less relevant purchasing segment than in more developed ecommerce countries
• Choice and convenience are what Indian shoppers say matters to them; practical experience suggests that the sense of getting a discount/bargain is much more important
• Barriers to online purchasing are those that might be expected, and which are exacerbated by cross-border: delivery charges, confidence in returns, security of payment, availability of payment methods
• Motivations for purchase in commodity categories such as consumer electronics are globally standard; marketing messages need little adjustment
• Purchase in other categories, such as fashion, accessories or jewellery are very strongly motivated by family or festival events. The festival calendar in India is complex, varying by religion and region. Tailor your marketing messages very carefully.
37 Ibid. Note that this second survey covers purchases over an extended period, and multiple responses were allowed, hence the data adds up to much more than 100%
Figure 18 - Missguided using Jabong as a D2C sales channel
20 21
Social media usage
Google+
Twi�er
Tumblr
Snapchat
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 60%50%
% of internet users who are active on...
Figure 20 - main social media activity applications in India
The slightly surprising reach of Google+ is partly a legacy of the now defunct Orkut, once the dominant social media application in India and owned by Google. Unlike most countries, Indian marketeers have been actively investing in developing their Google+ presence45.
The other unfamiliar presence is that of the Chinese giant WeChat; loosely speaking WeChat combines every other possible social application you’ve ever used into a single super-convenient application, with better conversion rates for online purchasing. WeChat’s owners are pursuing aggressive expansion in many Asian countries, and see India as a prime opportunity.46
This interest from China should act as a broader call-to-action for those considering China as a cross-border target: the Chinese are coming, spearheaded not only by Tencent’s WeChat, but by Alibaba’s Ali-Express.
Those considering using Social Media as their main, or only, online marketing channel in India should beware of (or possibly exploit!) its extremely skewed demographics (Figure 21). Three-quarters of all active users are aged under 30, and the majority are male.
Demographics of Facebook Users in India
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
13-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60+
Age Group
% o
f tot
al a
ctiv
e us
er b
ase
Female
Male
Figure 21 - Demographics of Indian Facebook users47
45 EY, Social Media Marketing, India Trends, 201546 …to grow their 700M+ active users; Source: Tencent (who own WeChat), 201447 WeAreSocial, Aug 2015
Cross-border
Despite these obstacles, Indian consumers in addressable demographics (see section 1) still want to buy international brands and products online. Given the challenges of getting them from local websites for the simple reason that they often just aren’t listed there, it is unsurprising that Indian online shoppers make extensive use of cross-border purchasing (Figure 19):
% of internet shoppers who made a cross-border purchase
UK
US
Germany
Netherlands
China
India
Canada
Ireland
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Figure 19 - % of consumers who made a cross-border purchase, selected countries42
Not quite at the startling levels of other markets very poorly served by local ecommerce, such as Canada or Ireland, but still higher than China, the UK or US, for example. Moreover, predicted growth in 2016 of cross-border, based on consumer-survey data, was a very healthy 75%.43
So for India, cross-border could be a first route to market to its consumers; it may well remain the best option, even at scale. However as the marketplaces continue to develop their B2C propositions to be more brand-friendly, this could be expected to change
Marketing to IndiansIndians may be keen to purchase overseas brands, but you still need to keep reminding them to do so, and to choose you rather than a competitor. So even though a local transactional website may not be happening very soon, a local online marketing presence is still essential.
DeviceMobile: 87% of broadband subscriptions are through mobile44, and non-broadband users don’t really shop online. End of discussion? Well almost. Many of the remaining 13% are professionals using PCs in their workplace, and such users are amongst those most likely to make cross-border purchases.
So although your marketing should very definitely be mobile-first, it hasn’t quite reached the mobile-exclusive stage yet.
Social Media ChannelsThe profile of social media usage in India is likely to be broadly familiar (Figure 20). Facebook is up there as the top channel, as you might expect, and given the prevalence of English language skills amongst likely target consumers, your existing presence might well extend with very little effort.
42 Paypal, Global Snapshot, 201543 ibid44 Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Oct 2015
22 23
Google India itself offers search in nine vernacular languages in addition to English (Figure 23): Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi and Tamil, i.e. approximately 85% coverage and including all major urban areas.
Figure 23 - Google India in vernacular languages
Summary• There is a difficult channel choice to make when targeting Indians via ecommerce.
» The dominant online marketplaces offer weak control of brand combined with strong disintermediation between seller and buyer; a less than ideal pairing. However recent regulatory changes may lead to them developing features more sympathetic to brands
» Setting up an own website on an Indian domain is subject to difficult, and possibly prohibitive, regulations
» Cross-border may be a good option in the short term, but the as the marketplaces increase in sophistication, they may prove a more sustainable long term bet
• Cross-border ecommerce has been used by 36% of Indians who buy online. It was forecast to grow 75% in 2016
• Marketing should be mobile first; 87% of relevant internet access is via mobile
• The social media landscape is generally familiar: Facebook tops the charts for example
» Demographics of usage are biased towards the young, and very strongly skewed towards males
» The Chinese giant WeChat is making successful inroads into India, backed by aggressive marketing. It may be an interesting horse to back for the medium-term
• Search is totally dominated by Google: they have an 96% share of the market
• Google is driving efforts to make vernacular content accessible: they offer 9 languages in addition to English, covering around 85% of the population and all major urban areas of interest to retailers
» Around 45% of Indian internet content was published in vernacular languages in 2013, forecast to rise to 60% by 2018
» Investing in content in Hindi and Marathi might be a plausible starting point
Indians, and especially the younger fashion conscious consumers most likely to purchase online, are also highly responsive to influencer marketing48 , and the marketplaces in particular invest actively in this space.
Other digital marketing channels: email and SMS
Indian companies themselves don’t see social as their most important channel (Figure 22). Remember that you most likely won’t have a transactional website: however you probably still need a website presence, and so that channel in fact ranks as top priority.
Preferred e-Marketing Channels in India
Website
Social
SEM
SMS
Video
Others
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
% of survey respondents who used...
Figure 22 - preferred digital marketing channels in India49
Go back a few years, and SMS would almost certainly have been the next option.50 Stricter regulation, combined with evasive action taken by mobile users, has resulted in a return to email as the next preferred channel. A rather startling 29% of retailers send daily emails, according to one survey51. Unsurprisingly rising use of spam filters, generally rather fluid personal email addresses, and lack of consumer consent are growing issues.
Search and Content
The search engine situation in India is extremely simple: Google has a 96% market share. Your content should primarily be in English; none of the top Indian ecommerce sites has a non-English option.
There is a growing trend towards offering vernacular content (45% of content in 2013, forecast to rise to 60% by 201852), but there are 22 officially recognised languages. In practice, generating content in Hindi (with 422 million speakers) and possibly Marathi (another 73 million, and the language of the commercial capital Mumbai)53, might be an interesting possibility if you really want to aggressively target Indian customers. The challenge is that they will almost certainly still need to complete any online transaction in English. However given the particular demographics of Indian internet usage and also education, if you are targeting certain customer-segments especially women, you might contemplate vernacular marketing with the expectation that the final purchase will be made by someone else with English language competence.
48 The author can attest to personal experience of the demi-god status apparently enjoyed by Bollywood stars and cricketers, memorably including a wet-shave abandoned midway through by a barber more anxious to get a glimpse of his hero than receive his fee
49 Octane Research: The State of eMarketing in India, Nov 201550 Author’s note: during onsite consulting engagements in India in 2010 and 2011 my clients’ mobiles appeared
to be rendered almost unusable by a never-ending stream of marketing-SMS messages51 Octane Research: The State of eMarketing in India, Nov 201552 BCG, [email protected], Jan 201553 Census of India, 2011
24 25
PaymentGiven that it is rather unlikely that you will be creating a specifically Indian version of your website, than the complexities of local payment infrastructure are less relevant than in most markets. However, making an existing website intended for cross-border purchases by Indians more sympathetic to their preferred payment methods will certainly drive sales.
Data on preferred payment methods stated by different sources are exceptionally contradictory, probably due to the fairly rapid pace of change. The general thrust of the data is that cash-on-delivery is the preferred method, followed by card, with rapid growth in mobile payments (Figure 24):
Online Payment Methods in India
59%16%
12%
12%
1%
eWallets
Online Bank
Debit Card
Credit Card
COD
Figure 24 - distribution of online payment methods in India60
Cards
Credit card penetration is low, with only around 20M in circulation. Debit card penetration is much higher and growing quite quickly, by 9% in 2014 to reach 431M issued61, and these are often co-branded for Visa or Mastercard. In practice, such cards may not be fully enabled for cross-border purchases.
Cash on delivery
Although extremely unfamiliar if you are operating ecommerce in most western countries, cash on delivery is still the preferred payment method in many places, and India is one such.
Because it is so standard, it is typically offered by the larger parcel-delivery companies as a value-added service. It isn’t cheap: in India it generally costs around 2-4% in merchant fees to the handling parcel-carrier. Moreover there is still the considerable risk of expensively sending the goods, only for the buyer to decline to pay “on the doorstep”.
Nevertheless if you decide to ship cross-border, it is worth exploring if your parcels partner can support this option, and evaluating the associated costs and risks. Note that shipments of goods worth more than USD $2000 which are not paid for via a controlled payment gateway (i.e. are paid in cash) is not permitted.62
60 The Paypers, Online Payment Methods in 201661 Goldman Sachs, India Internet, 201562 Reserve Bank of India, 2015
PRACTICALITIES: LEGAL, PAYMENT, LOGISTICS
Legal issues
54 Section 43A of the IT Act titled “Reasonable practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information Rules, 201155 Indian Centre for Internet & Society56 ibid57 By the Telecoms Regulator, TRAI58 Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Thirteenth Amendment) Regulations, 201359 Octane Research: The State of eMarketing in India, Nov 2015
Introduction
The general consensus of the ecommerce community in India about the current state laws impacting ecommerce is that they are rather fragmented, and in some places terribly outdated (especially in the area of consumer protection). The following summarises key areas that are likely to affect retailers/brands contemplating India as a cross-border destination.
General advice would be to watch this space. There is broad agreement that updating is needed, and some update is in flight. In practice, however, such updates are likely to be modelled on legislation already in place in other countries, and are unlikely to be onerous if you are already compliant at home.
Data protection, cookies, storing informationIndia has a formal Data Protection Act in place, although it was only fully established in respect of I.T. systems in 201154. It covers what you would expect: if you (as a typical retailer/brand) are already compliant in your home country, you are probably compliant with Indian requirements. (As a general indication of the relative immaturity of the legal framework around ecommerce in India, the EU doesn’t accept that the Indian code is sufficiently strong.) Opt-in/opt-out is required when storing personal data. The law is less strict than in many countries. It does, however, restrict sharing this data with 3rd parties, so you cannot, for example, collect email addresses and then share them without explicit consent at the time of collection.55 There is no formal cookie law.56
SpamThere is presently no formal e-mail anti-spam legislation, although it is a topic currently under active discussion. The very strict Canadian system appears to be a likely preferred template.
SMS (and nuisance call) spam, which had reached plague levels, has resulted in a nationwide, regulated57 system of opt-out, generally known as DND – do not disturb.58 Its relative effectiveness, compared to many other countries, is reflected in the switch of preferred e-marketing channel from SMS back to email.59 Distance selling, consumer protection and returnsIndia has existing laws covering consumer protection. They are generally considered outdated (they were promulgated in 1986 and the most recent update was in 2002), and an updated framework is making its (slow) way towards becoming law.
Although the law is outdated and evolving, a current basic working assumption should be that the consumer has a 7-day cooling off period during which no-fault returns are possible.
And, apart from totally standard provisions about not misrepresenting your goods and services – if you are compliant at home, you’ll definitely be compliant in India – well, that’s about it.
Local practice is increasingly to make returns easy for the consumer, but there’s no legal need to do so.
Disclaimer
This document is provided for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal, investment or other professional advice on any individual matter. Whereas every effort has been made to ensure that the information given in this document is accurate, IMRG accepts no liability for any errors, omissions or misleading statements, and no warranty is given or responsibility accepted as to the standing of any individual, firm, company or other organisation mentioned. Publication as well as commercial and non-commercial transmission to a third party is prohibited unless prior permission is obtained from IMRG. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of IMRG.
26 27
In practice, you therefore have three (or four) main options.
1. Use a point-to-point shipper with an Indian presence, such as DHL or Fedex, which is expensive but reliable; it may not cover the whole of India, but in practice will probably cover 98% of likely sales. You may need to modify your checkout to validate PIN-code coverage. Expensive but reliable.
2. Use a specialist parcel forwarder with a partnership with a local Indian delivery company, such as wnDirect, P2P logistics, or Spring. Mid-price, mid-service.
3. Rely on accessing India Post, usually by using your local national postal service e.g. Royal Mail as local the access point. Lowest price. Unfortunately also accompanied by far the highest chance of the parcel getting lost. Again statistics are difficult to come by, but anecdotes are not. If your items are of high value, probably not the best choice.
4. Don’t ship to India, but still target Indian customers and hope they’ll manage to get the stuff there by themselves.
The alternative, particularly if you are using marketplace channels, is of course to ship in bulk to India, and have a local partner organise the delivery. A local partner will be mandatory if you are at any useful scale: more rules on foreign ownership apply here, most especially a requirement to partner (or have) a local legal entity.
Offering free returns from India back to your home country is prohibitively expensive. Even Asos, normally major enthusiasts of free or subsidised fully-managed returns don’t attempt them from India, instead directing the customer to their nearest India Post Office64.
Using the marketplaces
Both Flipkart - plus its subsidiaries Jabong and Myntra – and Snapdeal aim to own the relationship with the end-consumer. Obviously there’s a possible downside to this: disintermediation from your customers. However there is a much larger corresponding upside: owning the relationship with the end consumer means they also take ownership of last-mile delivery… and returns.
Flipkart/Jabong/Myntra especially offers a variety of models for getting your goods to the final purchaser, including:
• Fully “stocked” model in India
• Consignment model, where you ship wholesale to India to their warehouse(s)
• Parcel-by-parcel model managed by a third-party specialising in purchasing at wholesale prices in the UK, and selling on the marketplaces in India on your behalf65
There are pros and cons to each, but in general, having someone else shepherd your items through importation, customs, and last mile is worth serious consideration.
Taxes & Duties
There is no De Minimis for shipping into India, so customs duties will apply. There’s a lot of variation in rates, from 0% to 150%, although in practice the overall results tends to be somewhere between 20% and 30% for most likely categories of interest for cross-border ecommerce. Their structure is complex, and includes various additional levies, such as the disturbingly named CEX and CESS. Calculations are not straightforward.
The Indian central board of excise and customs provides a website which allows you to calculate duties and tariffs, although be warned that it’s fairly maddening to use66: www.icegate.gov.in/Webappl . You will need the standard HS code for the product (which this website refers to as CTH, India’s flavour of HS, although for most purposes they are identical).
In practice, excluding VAT (e.g. British VAT at 20%) and then applying local taxes and duties, will tend to make your items about 10-15% more expensive overall than they are to domestic customers. A few relevant examples follow67 (Figure 26)
64 See Asos.com India delivery and returns policies65 Such as that offered by sponsor WeArePentagon, branded Arcade66 Hint: amongst various UI challenges, the following is probably the key one: on the initial menu,
don’t enter the full 8 digit HS code; instead you need to enter the first 4 or 6 digits, get directed to another screen which presents a list of 8 digit codes, and click-thru on the applicable code from there.
67 Using the icegate.gov.in calculator. Figures have been rounded to 1 decimal point; the official calculations generate strangely precise numbers such as 24.491%
Wallets and Mobile Payents
A Unified Payment Interface (UPI) system for making mobile payments online has been developed by 29 Indian banks, and was launched in August 2016. It is expected to prove extremely popular, and also to render other eWallet solutions (such as Paypal) rather irrelevant in India.63
At the time of writing, take-up data was not available, but offering compatibility with it is certainly likely to be worth exploring, and will strongly signal to prospective Indian consumers your interest in selling to them.
Pricing
Informal guidance from the big marketplaces suggests that Indian shoppers generally expect to pay a little more to access western brands than these brands would sell for in their home markets. A premium of up to 35% is considered tolerable; this is not inconsistent with likely additional shipping and customs/duty costs.
LOGISTICS
ShippingGetting your goods to your prospective Indian customer is something of a challenge. In practice this is also the attitude taken by many Indian customers themselves. Although accurate data is, for obvious reasons, rather difficult to come by, it is believed that around 25% of Indian ecommerce sales are in practice shipped to addresses outside India (to friends or relatives) and then “informally imported”. This hidden potential in India consumers may make targeting them more attractive than is initially apparent.
There are 25,000 postal code regions (known as PIN codes) in India. Only India Post covers most of them (Figure 25). In practice this is less of a restriction than might at first appear, because most prospective customers will live in the major cities.
PARCEL DELIVERY COMPANY OFFER PIN-CODE COVERAGE
(standard pre-paid)PIN-CODE COVERAGE (with cash on delivery)
India Post Standard parcel (4-8 days after customs clearance)
25000 i.e. all 25000
India Post Express parcel (2-4 days after customs clearance)
50 top cities Same 50 top cities
Blue Dart (a subsidiary of DHL)
Fully managed parcel delivery
3300 4100
DTDC ecommerce specialist 7100 8000Fedex Fully managed parcel
delivery2650 5550
Figure 25 - local parcel-carrier options in India
63 The Paypers, Online Payment Methods in 2016
28 29
APPLICABLE CUSTOMS + DUTIES (as a % of ex-VAT sale price)
Cotton shirt 24.5%
Leather-free trainers 29.4%
Silver jewellery 35.5%
Ladies Jeans 29.4%
Laptop 17.4% Figure 26 - Examples Customs + Duties for goods outbound from UK into India
Offering DDP (delivery and duty-paid in advance) shipping on your website is strongly recommended for India, unless you want your parcels to become enmeshed in Indian bureaucracy not famed for its speed.
Summary• The legal framework covering ecommerce in India is rather weak. Broadly speaking,
if you are compliant at home, you are compliant in India
• The exception is controls on SMS marketing, where India has a relatively effective system which has led marketers to prefer email as a communication channel
• 7-day cooling off is required, but otherwise consumer protection in areas around returns is weak
• There is no cookie law
• Cash on delivery remains the preferred method of payment
• Credit card penetration is very low, even amongst your likely affluent target customers. Debit card penetration is higher, although its usability for cross-border transactions is variable
• Mobile payment are predicted to gain rapid traction in India, given the unified UPI scheme recently rolled out by India’s top 29 banks. It may be worth exploring how you could offer this
• Logistics is a major barrier to Indian ecommerce.
» Many Indian customers work around this by having parcels delivered by websites to overseas addresses of friends or relatives
» Returns to home-country are likely to be prohibitively expensive, and few are attempting it
• Flipkark, Jabong, Myntra and Snapdeal all insist on taking care of last-mile delivery themselves; it may well be worth taking advantage of this, shipping wholesale to their warehouses, or going further and working with them to collect from you in the UK
• Fedex and DHL have extensive coverage of India for premium parcel shipping; DHL has a controlling stake in local player Blue Dart
• Solutions relying primarily on India Post enjoy a rather variable reputation, especially for higher value goods
• Semi-managed solutions offer a good balance between value and reliability for shipping into India.
• DDP (delivery and duty paid) shipping is strongly recommended into India
• Customs duties levels are generally high enough to ensure your products will be 10-15% more expensive in India than at home (once sales taxes are taken into account), but are not impossibly prohibitive
ABOUT PENTAGON
Pentagon is an end-to-end solution provider that enables brands and retailers to accelerate their online growth through 60+ global marketplaces worldwide.
Using a team of more than 150 ecommerce experts in seven countries worldwide, we optimise and localise data, integrate to new ecommerce platforms, connect stock management and order managements systems to marketplaces, launch and manage online stores, drive ecommerce sales, handle international logistics and returns, and provide multi-lingual customer service in more than a dozen languages.
Our tiered service offering provides retailers with a tailored solution to meet their unique requirements; from a robust technical integration to just one marketplace right through to fully managed online stores across multiple international platforms.
Get in touch to discover how we can accelerate your global online growth. #RetailWithoutBorders
Why Pentagon?• Unlike competitors, our success-based commercial
model aligns our business completely with our customers’ objectives.
• Our technology is a purpose built online marketplace integrator, with the ability to open up more marketplaces across the globe than any other software provider.
• We combine people plus technology to provide a fully managed, completely end-to-end retail solution across multiple online marketplaces globally.
• Our wholesale solution takes away the complexities of international ecommerce, as we sell your products for you on one of our global marketplace stores.
• We work with a wide range of customers from across the retail spectrum, focusing specifically on large brands and retailers. We are trusted by Next, Dyson, Ann Summers, BMW, Halfords, Maplin, Lloyds Pharmacy, Euro Car Parts, Sports Direct, Co-op, Phillips Lighting, Pretty Little Thing and Suzuki.
• Our vision is to deliver ‘retail without borders’ - enabling retailers in any part of the world to sell to customers across the globe.
wearepentagon.com | @wearepentagon [email protected] | +44 (0) 8940 5392
30 31
ABOUT IMRG
IMRG is the UK’s online retail association – a membership community offering neutral and unique resources for online retailers.
We help our members understand and improve their online retail performance through a busy programme of performance benchmarking, data analysis, insight, best practice-sharing and events.
We have been tracking online sales since 2000 – and now measure over 120 individual metrics in a series of indexes, providing in-depth intelligence on online and mobile sales, delivery trends, marketing ROI and channel performance.
Our membership community is comprised of businesses of all sizes – multichannel and pureplay retailers, multinationals, SMEs and micro retailers, as well as a wide range of solution providers to industry.
For more information please visit www.imrg.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Jones is a leading freelance specialist in multichannel and e-commerce, with extensive senior-level experience as both consultant and hands-on interim.
His clients have included: major wholesalers such as METRO and Travis Perkins; top global companies such as retailers Tesco and Target and logistics provider Kuehne + Nagel; the very famous – CPG Mars, and the fashion brand Dr Martens where he was interim Global ecommerce Director; and also the very niche – a VC-backed start-up in India, a B2B website in Romania, and a consumer electronics retailer in Belarus. He has onsite client engagement experience in 16 countries.
He is the author of “The Multichannel Retail Handbook – a guide to planning, implementation, operation and enhancement” now updated to its 2016 edition (ISBN 978-1-326-47257-3).
You can find him at: www.linkedin.com/in/redsock
Cross-Border Trading ReportIndia Country Guide 2018
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Published February 2018
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