Satyarth Priyedarshi

I am one of those who have been asking people not to start Ecommerce stores in light of #Amazon, #Flipkart et all with deep pockets spending tonnes of money to acquire customers.

Today I am revisiting that based on personal experience.
I have been buying art supplies from amazon, and a seller called “CreativeHands”. Because of some issue in ordering, I had to look up the seller on google to parley a solution.

Lo and behold, I find that the seller has its own professional #eCommerce site called Creativehands.in and had the entire range in one place, nicely curated and awesomely priced. (With a welcome discount of 500 on order of 2,000)
At this point I will admit that amazon has the same supplies as well and may be at 5% cheaper price.
But you have to understand that a store that is trying to sell everything cannot give you a user experience for one subcategory. The focus cannot be there.

For instance amazon has art supplies under mobiles #category and office supplies subcategory. You cannot find it via navigation. And search will just throw cluttered results.

Needless to say, I immediately cancelled my 2500 order on amazon and bought from this store.
If you are in such a category, getting your own site might not be a bad idea after all.

Recently spoke at IIT Bombay - Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management on technology in their running talk series. I spoke on technology and how it’s evolving to become more sticky.
Major points

(1) technology is coming physically closer to us. Laptop was a hand away, to phones even closer and if nerualink happens will be inside us. You are going to be the technology.

(2) technology is being anthromorphologised and will keep happening with Siri, Alexa and others. It’s not just voice interface, it’s personification. You don’t hate friends.

(3) technology is becoming transparent with google Soli, voice interface and amazon go. So now you won’t have to hold clunky gadgets, and you also won’t have a physical object to hate as representation of technology. You can’t hate what you can’t see.

The entire batch was there. The students were awesome with some very sharp questions and the campus was fabulous. Hard to believe that there is so much green right at the heart of concrete jungle of Powai.