Forbes India presents democratising e-commerce powered by GoKwik

Innovation in business means regularly updating the core, leading to overall organizational growth. With marketplace companies traversing new paths and scaling new heights, their top priority now is creating value. From shopping experiences and advertising to post-purchase decisions, it's innovation all the way!

In a discussion titled Forbes India Presents Democratising E-Commerce Powered by GoKwik, moderated by Manu Balachandran, speakers like Mr. Darpan Sanghvi, Group Founder and CEO at The Good Glamm Group and Mr. Chirag Taneja, Co-Founder, and CEO at GoKwik talk about the e-commerce industry, ways to overcome challenges they face and how technology can make them faster and more accessible.

How did Good Glamm Group become a unicorn? How did they leverage the content-to-commerce strategy to take the brand to the next level? Sharing his thoughts, Mr. Darpan said, "The Good Glamm Group was one of the first direct-to-consumer beauty brands to become a unicorn. The two things that we did before others were - first we cracked the customer acquisition cost through content creator commerce flywheel. When Good Glamm and Popxo came together, the results of the first content creator playbook were phenomenal. The customer acquisition costs dropped by 90% and new customers increased by 10x. The second thing we did right was creating a complete portfolio of beauty and personal care brands through our build + buy strategy. In India, scaling is limited to a single-category brand. We realised this and worked on it to grow beyond the plateau mark."

GoKwik is one of India's largest e-commerce enablers. Sharing his journey Mr. Chirag said, "We're a relatively young company having completed only 2 years. Earlier, I used to run a D2C brand called the Bombay Shaving Company. When COVID hit us, we realised e-commerce in India will happen outside of Amazon and Flipkart also. Customers today want a seamless shopping experience. To drive this, tech and data science are critical. Companies like us help convert high data science costs to marginal costs. This is how our journey started. To date, we've touched about 80 million shoppers and expanding work with almost 500 brands in the country."

The e-commerce industry is extremely competitive. These lead to several challenges for the companies. Sharing his thoughts on how Good Glamm Group overcame these Mr. Darpan said, "In e-commerce when you're trying to acquire a customer on your own platform, there is a customer acquisition cost that you pay. In customer acquisition cost, you need to ensure your AOV and you are getting enough cross margin in. You also need to ensure that your LTV which means the number of repeat customers is good so you keep making more than what you're spending. We at Good Glamm worked on these. As a beauty brand, it's very difficult to get the CAC right. Once you crack the trial, you can get the customer. Stickiness is inherent in the category so that was taken care of. The other problem is returns. In our category, the returns are only 4-5%. So that is also taken care of. The next problem is freight. In our brand, the products are less than 250-500 grams. So the freight cost is very efficient. Disruptive marketing helped us solve the major problems."

Continuing this conversation Mr. Chirag said, "E-commerce is very well-suited for this category. Indian beauty e-commerce is at a brand inflection point. GoKwik works on both the problems - CAC and retention. In India, 50-70% of orders happen on a cash-on-delivery basis which leads to the CAC going up. Several of these orders are not accepted. We solved this issue with RTO and we took a different approach to solve this, RTO exists because of customer intent and not logistical issues. We developed sophisticated data science-backed algorithms which can predict on a real-time basis what's the intent of this transaction. We solved for check-out in terms of how you convert somebody who has landed on your website. We work across the five-step process to increase customer conversion rate. Our strategy is divided into three broad buckets - most convenient, most trustworthy, and most rewarding. We work on enabling the customer to complete the transaction faster and convert faster."

Talking about how Good Glamm Group is growing its market share, Mr. Darpan said, "Market share is very relevant to us because we are hoping to be the number three makeup brand in India this year. Other younger brands under our umbrella are grabbing market share. Now that we're on the scale-up side, online beauty is growing by 40% year-on-year. Personal care is growing at 10%. In the next 10 years, the Indian beauty consumption story is going to be extremely strong."

To watch the full episode click on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3H-GQiiPmw

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