Here comes Amazon.com at last, sidling into India with Junglee.com. It is a suspiciously low-key entry, like a sneaky gambit in chess where a pawn footles forward only to clear the way for his queen. Whiff of brimstone but no heat of hellfire.
At the moment Amazon appears to have little choice but to lurk. There are restrictions on FDI in multi-brand retail. So Junglee is not an e-retailer so much as an “online shopping service” to help consumers find and compare similar products from different sellers, and read reviews of those products by other consumers, before they decide which they would like to buy. “Products”, not “books”, because books are just one of about 30 categories.
The newspapers carry guarded quotes from Indian e-commerce companies. Flipkart’s CEO told Business Standard something about FDI “going a long way” and the ultimate beneficiary being the “Indian consumer”. Flipkart is not on Junglee’s network, though uRead, Bookadda and others are.
Junglee claims 12 million products, but at least 9 million of them are the books sold on Amazon.com, with the dollar price converted into rupees. These books are usually available for much less in India — and that’s before you add Amazon’s awe-inspiring shipping charges and “customs duties”, which can easily double or treble the cost.
So Indian sites still have time in which to mount a defence. The way to do it is to learn from Amazon.
There is a clue in the disingenuous way in which Junglee explains its name. “Junglee means ‘of the jungle’,” says the site. “We appreciate how overwhelming it can be to navigate the jungle of products, brands, sellers, shipping options, and payment methods, and make informed purchase decisions.” So Junglee will “make it simple for you to navigate this jungle”.
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Literally, junglee does mean “of the jungle”. But most Indians don’t use the word like that. We use it to mean uncivilised, wild, ungovernable. It’s true that the online market is a bit junglee, in both senses. It does need a filter, a “shopping service” to catalogue, categorise and compare — like a search engine helps make sense of the Web.
Any e-commerce site should be able to help consumers “navigate this jungle”. A truly successful one, however, will get its customers to do all the work.
Just glance at the average book page on Amazon.com. There is an astonishing number of ways in which a visitor can help shape the page’s content. He can contribute his own images of the book. He can sell his copy and get rated as a seller, or buy a used copy and rate the seller. He can “like” it. He can add it to his wishlist, and make the list public. He can star-rate it. He can put it on his baby’s gift registry. He can see what others who bought this book also bought, or what those who saw this page went and bought. He can write a review, or read, rate and comment on other readers’ reviews. He can visit those readers’ profiles. He can see how highly ranked the reviewers are, and what “badges” have been bestowed on them. If he reviews often and well he too may earn badges, one of which even entitles him to receive pre-release copies of books to review. He can dip into forums dedicated to this particular book or to related books and topics. He can see other users’ reading lists on which this book appears.
The page is less about the book and more about the community it generates. Who needs marketing?
It’s this sort of immersive engagement that Indian e-commerce sites have not yet developed. All the basic infrastructure is already there, however, on Junglee. If the locals plan to compete, they must hurry up and copy.