Shayak Mazumder, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Eunimart in an interview with Techseen explains how the SaaS platform catalogs information from across the world on the performance of e-commerce marketplaces and consumer behavior.
Techseen: What exactly do you mean by a ‘cross border e-commerce pipeline’? How’s it different from an e-commerce marketplace?
Mazumder: A marketplace has a front-end to display the products to a customer where they can purchase products. A pipeline is a B2B aggregator that acts like a transparent interface between sellers and marketplaces allowing sellers to manage their products on multiple marketplaces. As such Eunimart acts as a SaaS platform with a business layer on top providing sellers with in-depth consulting and analytics on their products and brands, listing them on multiple international e-commerce marketplaces and providing tools to calculate duties and taxes, calculate pricing, complete end to end logistics, and India’s first company to provide a seamless channel for money to be remitted in INR in sellers’ accounts.
Techseen: What are the tools you use to trace the performance of e-commerce marketplaces and consumer behavior before cataloging information on your portal?
Mazumder: We use international reports generated by Nielsen, Paypal, Pyments, etc to do preliminary tracking of marketplaces. We use online tools like Sellplex to identify price points and traction of products. We also use detailed reports provided by partner marketplaces to carry out detailed analysis.
Techseen: Which platform do you ensure to host your servers? Do you use any dashboard for overall visualization?
Mazumder: We use Microsoft Azure, IBM Softlayer and AWS to host our servers. There is an excellent dashboard to give complete visualization for the sellers and administrators.
Techseen: How do you ensure the security of your servers while opening them to several marketplaces?
Mazumder: We are a B2B enterprise and as such, our servers are never exposed to the general public. Our frontend interfaces over SSL with sellers and our backend interfaces over SSL with marketplaces is open only for API access.
Techseen: Since you are playing at a global level, is there any difference between your Indian way and foreign way of doing business? Is there any difference in the kind of technology you use for both the audiences?
Mazumder: When you are addressing mature markets such as Europe you need to be able to understand customer psyche and requirements. The Indian market is very particular in its own way and Indian sellers need to be educated about preferences of global audiences. Hence, there is no one way to address audiences in different markets and we help sellers understand this.
However, in terms of products there are definite Indian products which help popularize Brand India. Technology is fairly similar worldwide in cross border ecommerce. We bring to the table an amalgamation of multiple services which are top of the line and definitely not available in India yet.
Techseen: Do you provide any definite templates to for creating ecommerce portals? Can a seller customise the template to better position his product?
Mazumder: Eunimart does not help create webstores. The idea is to reach the largest audience with the least effort. Online marketplace leaders have the necessary traction to take this ahead.
Techseen: What if your customers have questions or need to return an item? Do you provide customer service and issue Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMA)?
Mazumder: Customers address queries to the marketplace which send it to Eunimart. We send the query to the seller and our account managers help sellers address these queries. We do provide customer service. There is a veritable Returns Policy that we sign with every marketplace. Under this mechanism the returns are carried out.
Techseen: What are the current common risks and cyber-security issues for ecommerce? How do you mitigate them?
Mazumder: We are not exposed to any direct ecommerce related cyber-security issues because—First, our interface is strictly limited between sellers and marketplaces. Second, we never accept connections from the buyers (general public). Third, payment is routed within marketplaces themselves (we do not carry or store sensitive information). In other words, all such issues are self-contained within marketplaces themselves and we are never exposed to them.
Techseen: Who are your logistic partners? How do you plan to subsidize the shipping costs so that it consumers ordering on your site don’t have to shell out huge delivery expenses?
Mazumder: DHL Express, DHL Ecommerce, FedEx, Yakit are our logistics partners. We do not subsidize logistics cost. We optimize pricing so that least viable price is visible on the platforms.
Techseen: Can you share a few details about your expansion plans in India and abroad?
Mazumder: These will be unveiled in course of time. The geographies we already serve are South East Asia, South America, Africa, Europe.
