Backstory

Flipkart is India’s largest e-commerce company. Founded in 2007, Flipkart has grown into an e-commerce giant in India, with the Flipkart Group now including fashion e-commerce platforms like Myntra and Jabong, along with mobile wallet and payments app PhonePe. Flipkart Ads is an end-to-end commerce advertising platform.

Flipkart provides a digital platform to millions of vendors across the country to take their business online. Keeping the continuous growth of their vendor network has become more critical, especially in such hard times where everybody is hit by a pandemic. This unfortunate situation has left offline businesses at a crippled state, which gave Flipkart all the more reason to expand the vendor onboarding through a digital medium.

Objective

To conduct a virtual vendor onboarding with the similar experience of an in-person onboarding, i.e. Vendors being able to interact with Flipkart’s representatives at multiple touchpoints digitally to get successfully onboarded.

Based on the objective, we ideated launching a digital platform that helped vendors connect with Flipkart representatives to help them complete this tedious onboarding process.

Tracking the movement of the vendors from one touchpoint to another, helped us understand which funnel the majority of the crowd is stuck in.

Flipkart requires any vendor to complete three stages of getting onboarded:

1. Document submission

• GSTIN
• Canceled Cheque
• Sample Signature

2. Cataloging of their products

• Flipkart’s Catalog partners develop high-quality photographs of vendor’s products and crisp product descriptions for your product catalog.

3. Listing

• Flipkart gives a step-by-step process of how to list products on the website. It is important to choose the most suitable category to list your product as it helps customers find your products faster. Based on what they choose, they were asked to include product details such as size, model, colour etc.

So, the challenge was to have a robust platform that helped the vendors connect digitally with the respective teams to complete these three stages and to ensure a smooth & seamless onboarding experience.

Result

Not Your Usual Company developed a WPA (web-progressive application) solution branded for Flipkart, coupled with a seamless onboarding experience with the ability to help vendors connect with Flipkart representatives digitally.

All the vendors were given timeslots, evenly distributing the crowd and making sure the meeting windows were available for everyone. The entire day (11 am to 5 pm) slots housed over 137 vendors successfully interacting with Flipkart representatives, averaging 22 vendor & Flipkart Representative meetings in 1 hour!

The WPA solution helped vendors to get into an inquiry window first to help them navigate to the respective Flipkart Teams and provided Flipkart teams to manage the meeting availability slots on a real-time basis. The solution also gathers data that gives Flipkart deeper insights into where the vendors dropped off and which level most of the vendors had more problems to set them up for success in all their future digital drives.

If there’s a company that’s mastered the art of digital expansion, it’s Flipkart. We’re glad to be partners with them on this journey!

Why WPA (Web-progressive application) & not a website or a native app?

• Zero install – all PCs have a web browser
• Reduce business costs – less time spent talking to customers over the phone; eliminate printed materials; allow users to update their details
• Centralized data is secure and easy to backup
• Quick and easy updates
• Reach anybody, anywhere in the world
• Available for 24 hours a day & 7 days a week
• Low spec PCs and smartphones can be used
• Online training can be completed at the user’s own time and pace
• Direct access to the latest information – for Employees where they are located
• Always up-to-date

WPA was the best-suited solution considering the end-user (Vendor).