Why Indian content platforms are getting into e-commerce

Indian content platforms are finding their natural extension into the e-commerce space. Until now, they have been creating branded content and serving as content distribution platforms for other brands to help generate sales leads. Content is a fantastic way to build large and loved brands.

Platforms such as MensXP, POPxo and The Better India have already forayed into the commerce model to sell their own merchandise. Fork Media recently launched commerce on Curly Tales. In the past, ScoopWhoop also tried its hands on the commerce model.

Times Group-owned Indiatimes Lifestyle Network (ILN) ventured into commerce space through its content platform MensXP and now plans to extend it to iDiva. ILN plans to set up offline stores across the country.

POPxo entered the commerce game by building strong direct-to-consumer product lines across fashion, beauty and lifestyle, and marketing the same via content and influencers. Recently, they also launched their offline store.

LBB’s business continues to be centred around helping local brands and businesses get discovered, and commerce for the platform is an extension of the same. The Little Black Book started selling merchandise six months ago on its platform. Before that, LBB was purely an information marketplace — a platform that connects consumers with great local brands and businesses through information and content (most of which is user-generated).

Fork Media also embarked on its commerce journey by selling merchandise on its platform Curly Tales.

Content is the best and the most cost-effective way to build a large and engaged community. It makes sense to capture value by adding a commerce layer to the monetisation playbook. Creating good content helps build communities with a common interest, which generate conversations around a product. These conversations are like sales leads. Utilising the power of community building, content platforms create conversations around their own merchandise and inspire the community enough to buy the products.

Samar Verma

Samar Verma, CEO and Founder, Fork Media, said, “I do believe that with content, one takes the consumer to the point of inspiration and from inspiration (sales leads), the transaction (actual sales) is the completion of the journey. We want to play on that journey. We are focused heavily on creating good content, which will able to build a community and a conversation around it, which is the inspirational side of the story. Now we are transcending to the transaction part of the story.”

ILN wants to close the purchase journey loop through its e-commerce foray, which in future could potentially be into physical retail touchpoints as well.

Angad Bhatia

Angad Bhatia, Chief Operating Officer of Indiatimes Lifestyle Network, said, “We always knew it is a type of content category that has a very high affinity to purchase. We have always felt that the journey for the consumer has always been broken. Whether a consumer is trying to search the best list of products through Google, or getting a recommendation around products, the underlined aspects towards this content consumption is the inherent need that consumers have to purchase.”

“Our mission has always been to close that loop. Today, we feel that we are a step closer to that. Tomorrow, we are likely to get into retail. We are potentially going to have touchpoints around spas and salons in the country,” he added.

Suchita Salwan

Suchita Salwan, Founder and CEO, Little Black Book, said, “The merchant pool in India is large enough, and the goal for any platform or aggregator is to maximise spends/earnings per merchant or brand on their platform. At the end of the day, any business model is monetising eye-balls; the margin on those eye-balls changes with the business model in question.”

Priyanka Gill

Priyanka Gill, the Founder and CEO of POPxo, believes that the main challenge with a pure-play content model is monetisation at scale.

She said, “Page views and video views get relatively low eCPMs (effective cost per mille) as the brands perceive the user’s purchasing power to be low. (This is pegged to the national per capita income). Plus the ad exchanges run by Facebook and Google take 50% of the ad revenue. With that in mind, at POPxo we are looking to add more monetisation layers by selling products directly to the user.”

Bhatia told BuzzInContent.com that the company’s seriousness towards content is much more than other content platforms. He said Times Internet invested a lot on building an e-retail chain for the business in the last one year. “To be able to create a marketplace of unique offerings, we spent last one year in setting up warehouses, delivery and logistics teams, hired best resources from top MNCs to head operations of the e-commerce business. We are building a very aggressive operations ecosystem at Times,” Bhatia added.

Giving reasons to connect consumers with great local brands and making them shoppable through LBB, Salwan said, “A lot of what we saw on our platform was that users were discovering great places and products because of LBB, but the funnel to access these brands was broken and that's how the initiative to build our brand catalogues and making them shoppable through LBB came about.”

Since then there is no looking back for LBB. The company has been growing at 30-45% month on month from the number of orders point of view, and has on-boarded over 900 local brands, and over 10,000 products that can be bought via LBB.

Explaining about LBB’s differentiated commerce through content offerings, Salwan said, “We focus on 'shopping' not 'buying': buying is restricted to standardised goods where price is a bigger factor for the transaction than, say, design, functionality or discovery. Amazon may have made 'buying' a convenience, but it killed the thrill and serendipity that ties in with shopping. And that's a lot of what we want to bring alive through our platform. We're in a really unique position to leverage our community and network of both unique merchants and consumers to engage more deeply with our product.”

Salwan concluded, “I think it's also extremely important to not generalise content companies. The same way there are plenty of business models under commerce companies, be it marketplace, inventory and warehousing, logistics plays, direct to consumer etc. There's also varied 'content' models. Therefore, the reason for 'content platforms' to enter into commerce also varies from company to company.”