Customer experience Flipkart's biggest focus area: Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO

For a well-funded Flipkart, the focus is back on boosting customer acquisition, especially from small towns and cities. The digital marketplace expects to achieve this by offering financial options that make it feasible for shoppers to buy from its platform, and a wider selection of products, among other initiatives, CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in an interview.

Edited excerpts:

How was the start to the Big Billion Days sale this year (on September 20)?
We saw the biggest peak in traffic this year in the first 45 minutes. It was 50-60% higher than last year.

What is different about BBD this year?
This year, we have moved away a little from a pure pricing-led event to showcasing our selection of exclusives. We have also launched new affordability programs. There are several new concepts this year – debit card EMIs; buy-now, pay-later; extended warranties; assured buyback guarantees. On a normal day, any affordability programme sees 15% adoption of the total (gross merchandise volume, or GMV). For categories such as appliances and smartphones, the number could be higher at 25%. We are hoping it will be at least double in terms of adoption this year.

How much has your recent fundraising helped?
It is not just about BBD. What is important in a competitive environment is to focus on a few metrics—new customers, growth, units, GMV, (cash) burn in a very meaningful way, and good customer experience. We have been able to get some of these metrics behind us. Profitability was a very big metric for us last year. We have done a lot of it and we are now well-funded, and we don’t have to over-index on that. We can focus on getting new customers and improving customer experience. Customer experience, customer acquisition, cracking categories we have entered, strengthening our engineering infrastructure and scalability are things we are focused on now.

What specifically is your focus on customer acquisition?
We are expecting growth of 85-90% in new customers over last year. We are expecting roughly two times the number of customers who shopped with us last year by this festive season.

What is your focus on private labels and exclusives this year?
Exclusives in mobile phones and large appliances will be more than 50-60%. Even in fashion, which is fragmented, we will have a large number of exclusives. Especially in footwear, where it will go up from 35% last year to 65% this year.

What is the spend on BBD this year?
In absolute spend the increase will be just less than 10% from last year, while marketing is slightly lesser than last year despite GST and inflation. Last year, we were 20-25% lower than the year before.

Has your strategy mainly been to focus on higher-value items? Amazon and Paytm are looking at repeat customers with lower transaction value.
You can focus on low-value transactions and repeat (purchases) but the question is if that is sustainable. It is not sustainable. We will focus on it but we will build it the right way. Grocery is probably weeks or months away.