This was a common phenomenon in the early years: the only people Sachin truly respected were the ones who stood up to him. Not only did he wield power because of his position as Flipkart’s co-founder and CEO, he also had unusually strong views about most things. He was a formidable geek–bully. It took courage and intelligence to spar with him, and he showed regard for those who did so and could prove themselves right.
ONE OF THE biggest drivers of Flipkart’s growth in 2011 was forced on the company by Sachin against the advice of many colleagues. Even though Flipkart was expanding at an extraordinary rate, Sachin hankered for more. He was particularly unsatisfied with the mobile phones business. A year after launching the category, Flipkart was selling up to a couple of hundred phones every day. Vipul Bathwal, who had overseen the mobiles category, had leftthe company to join a rival. In early 2011, he was replaced by Flipkart’s Bombay office head, Indranil Dutta, who had moved to Bangalore to take up the new role.
Sachin had gone to the US for a visit that same year. There, he observed that Amazon and other e-commerce companies offered shoppers the choice of returning or exchanging products that didn’t satisfy them. In India, however, it wasn’t easy for customers to return products as most sites struggled to get products to customers in the first place! No Indian e-commerce company had built the infrastructure to handle returns; the logistical cost was thought to be prohibitive. This prevented them from allowing shoppers to return unsatisfactory products, who, in turn, would be displeased on being stuck with products that didn’t match up to their expectations. Since Flipkart’s founding in 2007, Sachin and Binny had known that Indians lacked trust in online retailers, preferring to go to malls or independent stores to buy books, electronics and clothing. There was too much uncertainty online, too many annoyances. This only compounded the customer’s inherent resistance to buying things they hadn’t seen or felt. Although Flipkart’s unrelenting pursuit of pleasing customers had won over a few hundred thousand sceptics, e-commerce was still just a niche business.
Sachin came to realize that Flipkart would have to constantly coax and lure customers with special incentives to encourage them to overcome their mistrust of e-commerce. He also understood that offering product returns wasn’t even a special incentive; it was an essential feature of commerce anywhere. In a low-trust society like India, how could a retailer not offer this facility? It would have to be done. In the middle of 2011, he proposed the introduction of an ultra-flexible thirty-day returns policy.
Flipkart executives were shocked. The company had just begun expanding its nascent in-house logistics service; it wasn’t equipped to handle returns. Besides, Flipkart’s overhead costs would shoot up. Even Binny protested, pointing out that their spending might go up by two per cent. To this, Sachin had a ready counter: ‘But our business will grow as well.’ Another senior Flipkart executive insisted that a returns policy would lead to fraud, that it would be misused. Sachin shot back angrily, ‘For that one per cent, why would you penalize the ninety nine per cent? We’ll just blacklist them.’
In the second quarter of 2011, Flipkart introduced its returns policy. Customers could return any product within thirty days without having to provide an explanation. It turned out to be an inspired move. Customers took to the policy immediately and orders increased further.
But introducing the returns policy wasn’t enough in itself. It had improved Flipkart’s popularity with its existing customers, but it didn’t attract large numbers of new users. The problem was that while the company had surpassed its predecessors and peers and greatly improved the online shopping experience, most Indians, even in the cities, were yet to hear about Flipkart. And most of its present users still saw Flipkart primarily as a books retailer that happened to sell other goods. They were tremendously loyal, but their numbers were insignificant within the overall retail market; Flipkart was still just a cult brand. To take e-commerce to the masses, at least in the urban areas to begin with, the company would have to turn to mass advertising.
Around the time it launched the thirty-day returns policy, Flipkart had started considering marketing seriously. This was hard to believe if one was familiar with the company’s first advertising campaign of April 2011. Set in an old English village, the ad featured an English grandmother who ordered books online through her pet mouse. Ordering books online was presented as an act of magic. After ninety seconds, the fantasy abruptly ended with the punchline: ‘You don’t need magic. Just log on to Flipkart.’5 Few bothered to. In 2016, Sachin spoke about how he had unsuccessfully described the concept of Flipkart to his own grandmother, ‘I have tried [to describe Flipkart to my grandmother]. But I don’t think my grandmom really liked it. I told her, “This is a phone. You press a button on it and the product arrives at your doorstep.” She told me, “Why would somebody do that? Why wouldn’t you just go to the shop and buy?”’6
By early 2011, Ravi Vora had joined Flipkart as the head of marketing. A short, dour-looking man, Ravi had spent nearly a decade with the consumer goods makers, Hindustan Unilever and Heinz, known for their expertise in marketing and sales. He was unimpressed by the previous advertisement that had been overseen by Sachin and Tapas. Immediately he set to work on a new campaign.
It had two primary goals – to attract new users, people who had never shopped online before, and to position Flipkart as an all-purpose retailer that sold a range of
