Magento Commerce bets big in India; brings together industry experts

According to experts from the retail and e-commerce industry, it is projected that e-commerce in India is expected to grow more than 20 percent in 2018-19 from its current size of USD 33 billion to become a USD 200 billion e-commerce market by 2027 with over 20 percent CAGR over the next nine years, translating into a 12 percent online penetration within retail sales, versus ~2 percent now.

To understand the trends, challenges and growth enablers of the online retail sector in India, e-commerce experts came together for a round table discussion on "Omni-channel Retail and E-commerce Trends in India". The event was an initiative of Magento Commerce and its partner Embitel Technologies Ltd., which is organising such events all over India. The roundtable discussion held in here on Friday was the first initiative which brought together many retail and ecommerce experts.

The event commenced with a session of Daniel Rebhorn, Founder of Dichonium Digital on AI, which outlined the importance of data generation and harnessing it. He highlighted Machine learning enabled Magento Commerce's enterprise solution powering business growth through product affinity, purchase patterns, smarter inventory and customer segmentation.

The session was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Sreedhar Prasad, Partner and Head - Consumer Markets, KPMG along with Shamik Sharma ex Myntra, Arun Kumar, Embitel, Ajay Kashyap, Boxx.ai, Rashi Gulati, Zephyle, Guru Bhatt, PayPal and Nicholas Kontopoulous, Magento commerce. The experts touched upon topics of Technology, Content, Catagories and others as the four pillars in trends of retail and e-commerce business and discussed on the how e-commerce sector should move towards getting next 50 million customers online by enabling e-commerce with Indian languages for non-English users and easy payment options for the millennials.

Some of the key points of the discussions were to give a clarity on the entire approach on E-Commerce. Many of the experienced Industry people in India, B2B or B2C are talking about not just e-Commerce but digitally influenced revenues and not just a transaction on a website. Digitally influenced revenue can or should be top part of the business growth according to some experts to enhance the revenues through E-Commerce.

Seeing the need to make e-commerce accessible to less privileged and non-metros, the experts coined new customers as "unemployed consumers" and "non English speaking internet users in India who constitute to around 250 million people" who would contribute to or bring about a major influence in the growth of e-Commerce business.

Anand Natarajan, Enterprise Sales Leader from Magento Commerce - India/South Asia in his key note address outlined recent investments made by Magento in expanding its presence in India and Asia Pacific to enable businesses to accelerate their E-commerce growth with its strong portfolio of Magento Commerce Cloud for B2C/B2B, Magento Order Management for Omni-channel solution, Magento Business intelligence and Magento Marketplace.

"The trends are moving from brick and mortar retail bouncing back with show rooming to web rooming, higher adoption of B2B Commerce and Omni Channel solutions bringing best of both worlds of Online and offline retail and also be a win-win for consumers and businesses," he said.

Magento, has been ranked as a leader in digital commerce by various industry publications and analysts including Gartner and Forrester. Internet Retailer annual report IR 2017 put Magento as the leading platform choice among Top 1000 B2C sites (IR2017) and Top 300 B2B sites (IR B2B) with highest growth rate last year.

E-Commerce is not a channel to grow your sales but it is to engage with your customers which means the content, the engagement and the experience given to the customers by adding some sort of marketing automation, personal experiences which are critical.

Anand also highlighted on how traditional businesses in India learning from global case studies, will challenge online market places by setting up their own Enterprise grade E-commerce portal to engage with customers to grow business, improve customer engagement and expand reach. He has also projected 2018 will be the year of B2B Commerce for enterprises driven by B2B consumers demanding B2C experience for B2B and GST roll-out mandating businesses to transact and reconcile digitally.

"Embitel continues to believe in Omni-channel as the game changer for the ecommerce landscape and during the course of this event, AI and personalisation emerged as the driving forces of the next wave of ecommerce growth. Embitel is geared to help with implementation of AI- driven E-commerce solutions," said Sharad Bairathi, MD, Embitel Technologies Ltd.

The last session was on Omni channel retail which was moderated by Ganesh Iyer CIO - Future Group along with Alagu Balaraman, ?CGN Global, Manish Kapoor, Spencers Retail, Dhananjay, CIO, Kurl-On Ltd., Terence Thambi Rajah, Magento Commerce, Sridhar Narayan, Adobe and Guru, Caratlane.

The experts discussed on the challenges and future of omni channel and highlighted on businesses to focus on engaging the customer at all levels to give a seamless and superior shopping experience to customers. They also discussed on the trends in brick and mortar business and how it is important for these businesses to innovate and engage with the customers and understand customers needs and wants.

The experts talked about how India has seen tremendous growth potential for brick and mortar business with digital transformation and innovation. Ganesh Iyer summarised panel discussion saying "Omni-channel is not a project but but a journey and businesses should start thinking omni channel as data driven model rather than just physical movement of goods.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)