Now, IIMs have one more company queuing up their gates to recruit its students: e-commerce firms. Already hit by a severe talent crunch at senior levels, these new-age companies are now eyeing top B-school grads to head their analytics division.
Web analytics, which deals with data interpretation to track website visitors, analyse their preferences and behaviour etc, helps identify popular trends useful for market research. The division has gained predominance lately so much so most e-commerce firms have created a unique post called chief analytics officer to handle the huge amount of data piling up everyday.
“For a very long time, analytics was a sub-sect of marketing. But now companies have realised the value of customer data and want the best of minds to work for them,” says Mr. Ranjith Boyanapalli, CEO, Buytheprice.com.
Currently in India, there are 10 million e-commerce users and the Indian e-commerce market is pegged to grow to $25 billion from the current $10 billion over the next few years.
Though analytics as a science has been developing for sometime, it has picked up over the last five years. “What changed this pace is the growth of non-travel and retail e-commerce,” says Mr Gaurav Chhaparwal, head of analytics in Snapdeal.com. Customer personalisation in e-tailing is easier than offline retailing and has translated into more business increasing e-commerce activity, he adds.
Confirming the view, says Mr Sachin Singhal, Head, Naaptol.com, Indian e-commerce, largely restricted to books and mobiles, has now grown to include apparels, footwear and other lifestyle products, thanks to growing confidence and targeted advertising based on analytics. “The average ticket size has grown from Rs300-800 to Rs1100-1500 during last one year,” he adds.
“E-commerce is a capital intensive business and analytics holds the key to achieve bottomline growth by getting the most relevant traffic at the lowest cost that converts into sales,” says Mr Ranjith.