New product development strategies to reshape the e-commerce industry in India

Abstract

India has seen a rapid growth in the E-commerce Industry in the past few years. The concept of e-commerce has moved ahead from the concept of just common e-retail and travel into diversified fields like jewelry, grocery, online medicine, furniture, food delivery, instant taxi among many others. The e-commerce market is expected to grow further and touch USD 84 million from the USD 24 million market in 2017. With the increasing number of players and growing competition, companies need to develop new products and strategies to sustain and grow in the market. Through this project, we explored some of strategies deployed by e-commerce companies in different domains like travel, food delivery, e-retail, cab services, etc. and came up with possible new product developments that can help them gain sustainable competitive advantage or reach out to more customers and increase market penetration. From our analysis, we have come up with 4 new product development solutions for the e-commerce industry. The first one is a concept of delivery lockers for e-retail players which can greatly enhance the whole delivery process and save a lot of delivery time thereby increasing efficiency. The solution targets large office parks, educational institutions, business areas and residential complexes which usually have large number of orders and take a lot of time to deliver all the products at that place. Our second new product development is an integration feature between the train booking platform like IRCTC and cab aggregators like Uber, Ola which would help passengers receive a taxi at their arrival at the destination location without any additional booking or waiting. The taxi would be scheduled on live tracking and can be even accessed by passengers not having a smartphone though normal SMS thus increasing the reach for cab aggregators. Our third solution is a voice assist feature in the e-retail web and mobile applications to increase the penetration of e-commerce across the older generations as well as in the rural and remote areas who are not comfortable in accessing the e-commerce platforms. The proposed voice assist feature can be utilized for both initial training and as a help tool during later stages. Our final solution utilizes the differences in peak load of food delivery boys and two-wheeler taxi services. As these two segments see their peak loads at different times of the day and are more idle during other hours, an integrated application can help them utilize their time better thus increasing efficiency for both the involved companies and reduction in the number of delivery person required thereby saving costs.