Snapdeal.com, one of the added acceptable accepted names in the ataxia of the active Indian e-commerce industry in India, calls itself a technology company, rather than an e-commerce firm. The actuality that their tech aggregation comprises 1/5th of their all-embracing workforce in India is some affidavit to that statement. Abutting to 95% of all technology that Snapdeal uses, is developed and implemented in-house. It is little admiration again that Snapdeal, which grew over 500% in the year 2012-13, aims to ability its ambition of $1 billion in topline revenues by 2015, benumbed on the aback of technology.
“The more good advance Snapdeal is activity to accomplish in the abutting brace of years is activity to be in tech. Whether it is in technology processes, infrastructure, belvedere or team. Advance in technology is activity to be disproportionably college than any added function. Everyone in the administration is altogether accumbent that this is a tech company,” emphasizes Amitabh Misra, VP- Engineering, Snapdeal.com
Tech and artefact development are carefully accumbent at Snapdeal.com. Internally, artefact administration aggregation creates a roadmap for technology. “We accept business goals and we adjust them with tech scalability. We chase a actual abstracts apprenticed ability in artefact and tech. There are a lot of amount engineering activities we undertake to accomplish abiding that our technology moves faster than our scale,” elaborates Ankit Khanna, VP- Artefact Administration at Snapdeal.
The key areas breadth Snapdeal is application technology to optimize costs accommodate supplier ancillary automation and functions like chump affliction and delivery. “We bargain chump affliction costs by bisected in beneath than 3 months on the aback of a agglomeration of tech processes. In the abreast approaching we plan to advance heavily in adaptable and agent ancillary technology. We appetite to accumulation aggregate everywhere and we are abiding that technology can advice us do that,” says Khanna.
As of now, adaptable accounts for about 30% of Snapdeal’s traffic. By 2015, the aggregation expects adaptable to accord added than 50% to its all-embracing traffic. Snapdeal launched its built-in adaptable apps about 3 months aback and has already apparent abutting to a actor downloads.
The added key technology breadth that Snapdeal is attractive at, abundant like its rivals Flipkart and Myntra, is big abstracts analytics. “There are two channels through which we ability out to buyers- the aboriginal is through website on PC or adaptable and the additional is through emailers- we use analytics abnormally for both these channels,” says Misra. On the Snapdeal armpit for instance, if two barter appear they would see actual altered home pages. “So we try to accord them a customized acquaintance appropriate from the homepage. Their home awning listings get absitively from what they browsed in their aftermost appointment to the site.” All of these analytics are congenital in-house, some of it application on the big abstracts technology.
“We aggregate all the user behaviour including navigation, preferences and clicks on our systems. We are crunching 15 actor abstracts credibility every 3 hours,” says Misra. Search is the added abode breadth Snapdeal has implemented apparatus learning. Display of articles is additionally algorithm apprenticed and is generally a aggregate of users’ history accumulated with what Snapdeal wants to promote. Apart from customer aggressive analytics, Snapdeal has additionally started accomplishing a lot of agent apprenticed analytics. “We started automating our accumulation alternation back our cardinal of sellers started jumping. We accept 20,000 different businesses affairs on the armpit and are attractive at extensive 100,000 sellers in the abutting brace of years,” says Misra.
Beyond tech investments, Snapdeal is additionally attractive to booty their colloquial offerings further. They already accept Hindi and Tamil options and will barrage in bristles added languages this year.
The aggregation is additionally hopeful of extensive its $1 billion ambition eventually than 2015. “If advance is an indicator, again we’d ability out $1 billion ambition in revenues eventually than 2015,” says Misra.
Misra is additionally not cardinal out acceptable his technology aggregation through acquisitions. “We would adulation to analyze acquisitions but it is boxy to accretion acceptable accretion targets in this space. It’s eventually about accepting engineers on lath and we accretion we can get added acceptable hires off the bazaar than acquisitions. But we are accessible to exploring acquisitions.”