Where shopping becomes a drug

Last week, 23^rd September to be precise, the accounts guy in my office walked up to me asking if I was registered on Flipkart. Considering I have been shopping a rather long time with Flipkart, I answered the affirmative. But this was not a usual shopping registration; this was improving odds for the Xiaomi Redmi 1S sale on Flipkart on that day. What we were playing for- being amongst the top 40,000 of 2,40,000 registrations who would have clicked the buy button at the right moment to buy a phone. Call it fanatic; he was delaying lunch beyond 1400 hrs just to try his luck before food that day.

This is not an isolated moment. It has become a need of the hour for online retailers. While offers and discounts are great to attract a shopper for the day; his experience will decide if he may or may not come back. Today there are sites and apps like Junglee which troll the e-retail sites and get back with the best offers and prices for the day across all possible sites. The result I see is complete loss of brand loyalty for purchase of goods. Loyalty now is confined to which site has the best rates for that day. In many cases, while you may track a particular product for a few day on one particular site- the actual purchase may happen on another one- thanks to a special day offer on it.

This is presenting a very unique challenge to e-retailers; you have buyers who are heavy switchers between all possible sites selling similar products. If a particular buyer had come to you by virtue of a special offer, it is not always economically feasible to get him back each time purely on discounts. How do you maintain a steady flow of audience to keep coming back for more after that first purchase and buy at full prices?

The category leaders are actually coming up with a wide variety of programmes to get their customer base towards loyalty and build larger number of repeat purchases. The first was product bundling which was in fact a no brainer. Get a cart worth a certain amount to avail free delivery. Flipkart then launched the Flipkart First, where paying Rs. 500 as a membership ensured faster delivery and distinguished customer service. Typically, this amount is what a customer will pay for minimum ten standard deliveries and is a nice way to ensure repeat audience. The other way most of the websites are racking up audience is higher discounts and bundled offers on weekends- a time when I suppose online traffic take a dip.

Another way employed by Flipkart is something I believe was a test- Rs 1 Sale, where a limited stock of a select set of 6 items was up for sale on 22^nd September. This was valid only for a short window of 2 hours running from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on a Monday; which may be the time for the lowest number of hits for shopping on a weekday. Another It might only be time before Amazon and Snapdeal will have to follow something similar to boost repeat purchases. More and more I observe, I am getting to a conclusion that the idea here is to get people to become an online shopaholic.

We had a term while in college known as retail therapy- the best way to break a monotonous day was go window shopping or for groceries as it would transform the mental state away from work or study. E-retailers and now pushing people into an online retail therapy which is easily accessible and highly addictive. I would say this is potentially a drug: where once bitten, you may just find it hard to withdraw from. Yes it is convenient- but also has the possibilities for people to go overboard and ruin the balance of spends versus savings very soon.