A recurring theme in this newsletter is the identification of obstacles and limits constraining businesses in India. Astonishingly, this is a topic that’s rarely explored. Even today, our understanding of limits in businesses is usually a single sentence which can be found in most news articles: 

“According to a recent report by <Insert Consulting Company name>, the size of the <Insert vertical> market is projected to become <some big number in crores> by <current year plus 5 years>”. 

This sentence is the business journalism version of India’s US$5 trillion economy. It’s a way to grab headlines, but it ignores the harder question—i.e., a true understanding of the structural obstacles that lie in the way of companies and businesses, and what they are doing to surmount them. 

The reason I write about this is because the obstacles are way more interesting and consequential than the destination. 

And over the last year, thanks to a surge in capital (and now due to its quick retreat), these limits and obstacles have become much more apparent. 

I’ve already explained that India’s internet consumer market is basically the population of Sweden, how there are actually just 10,000 engineers in India, and why companies like Amazon and Flipkart are choosing depth over breadth. I also wrote about Netflix’s distribution problem, how nobody wants to buy software in India, and why the Tata Neu app feels like they’ve shipped their org chart. Then, there’s Jio’s strategy, which I’ve written about many, many, many times. 

Today’s edition is about another structural obstacle that internet businesses face in India. 

It’s called cross-selling.  

For years and years, nearly every internet business, from e-commerce to edtech to food-delivery to ride-sharing to fintech, believed that the solution to all their problems was… cross-selling. Go back and you’ll find that word in all their pitch decks, strategy documents, media interviews, and even in their IPO filings. Even today, most companies, irrespective of sector, believe that cross-selling is their answer to life, the universe, and everything. The conventional wisdom was—go big and get users, cross-sell stuff, and win the game. 

However, over the last few months, companies are finding out that cross-selling isn’t as easy as it looks. As they attempt what they believed was a small hop, they are discovering that it’s actually a wide chasm. Many are making the leap and are suddenly finding out that the ground has disappeared beneath their feet. 

The cross-selling chasm didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was always there. It’s just that most companies didn’t know it existed. Something that was invisible is now being discovered. 

Today’s edition, though, is about how one company knew about this chasm for a long time, and how it quietly changed itself to succeed. 

Flipkart was the first to discover the cross-selling chasm.

It’s also the first to cross it. 

Let’s dive in. 

The offline world always knew what the online world didn’t. 

Cross-selling in India doesn’t work the same way as it does in other parts of the world. 

However, the conventional wisdom was that what happens offline is not what happens online. That somehow, the way people buy things online is different, and makes cross-selling a unique opportunity. 

Broadly speaking, the standard form of cross-selling online is something like this. A lot of users come to our website or app to do one specific thing. Let’s add more unrelated things and make them buy that.

This is why when you open an app like, say, PhonePe to transfer money to a friend, you see a sea of things all clamouring for your attention. Insurance. Lending. Flight tickets. SIPs. IRCTC. Or you fire up CRED to pay a credit card bill, and you are nudged to buying anything from a mattress to potato chips. Even more bizarre is when you open Ola to book a cab, and find out that you are being sold…well…

And all these companies are slowly discovering that this is much harder than it looks. Here’s my colleague, Jaspreet, who wrote about PhonePe and Paytm’s cross-selling ambitions last month. 

The list goes on and on and on.  

Despite best attempts, nobody has succeeded in selling Indians something that wasn’t an app’s core offering. 

Which finally brings me to Flipkart. 

Horizontal e-commerce operates differently from specialised vertical businesses like Ola, CRED, Paytm, Uber, or PhonePe. Since Flipkart and Amazon appeared first, they started with one category, then added another one, and another, and another, until they became what they are today. Every category that a Flipkart or Amazon added found dedicated customers, and grew their overall revenue. 

But the problem was still the same. People who came to their websites usually stuck to a narrow range of products, all in adjacent categories. So if someone bought a phone, they may be persuaded to buy, say, a mobile charger, but it wasn’t easy to get them to buy jeans. Similarly, if someone bought jeans, it was hard to get them to buy, say a washing machine. So both Flipkart and Amazon could have a lot of products, with a wide range of categories, but users stuck to their narrow lanes. Cross-selling was hard. 

We don’t have to look at Flipkart and Amazon to know this. 

We can look at the ones who came after them, and it’s evident that cross-selling isn’t working for horizontal players either.

Like Meesho, which despite all its efforts at expanding categories to drive cross-selling, currently has a foothold in just one category—women’s fashion. 

Or Tata Neu, which came in with an ambitious superapp plan, and is reportedly underperforming. 

Flipkart, since it came before anyone else, also knew well before others that cross-selling was much harder than it appears. There are several signals that it noticed, most notably because it worked closely with multiple brands across categories for nearly a decade. In all those years, there wasn’t a single brand which cracked cross-selling across categories. Even Xiaomi, which at one time used to be Flipkart’s most influential brand, managed to do it in just two categories—i.e., mobile phones and television. 

Flipkart discovered the chasm before everyone else did. 

So Flipkart decided that the best way to cross the chasm… was to not attempt to do it. 

While everyone else was trying to figure out how to add and integrate more offerings for cross-selling, Flipkart did the exact opposite. 

Instead of adopting a horizontal strategy, Flipkart chose to adopt a vertical-first approach. It broke its organisation into multiple business units, each with its own dedicated team, focused on one specific category. So there’s a business unit for mobiles. And another for electronics. And one for fashion. And so on. 

Most e-commerce companies have specific category teams, but Flipkart just made these teams more siloed and preserved this structure all the way to the top. Today, every business unit in Flipkart works largely independently, benchmarking themselves against their own competitors, with its own strategy. As an example, Flipkart’s beauty business unit tracks its market share not just with Amazon, but also with companies like Nykaa, Purplle, and Sugar Cosmetics. However, Flipkart’s Fashion business fights for market share against Meesho, Myntra, and so on. Each unit is free to adopt its own methods to win. 

A lot of people say that Flipkart’s last truly innovative product was Cash on Delivery, and there’s some truth to that. But I think Flipkart’s organisation structure is quite distinct, and I predict that in the years to come, it will be studied closely. Flipkart saw the cross-selling chasm and decided that instead of trying to solve for it horizontally, it would design an org to try and win every category vertically. 

Contrast this with, say, Amazon India, which still believes in a horizontal strategy. This is why it has Prime, which is a horizontal product based on the belief that users will use Amazon for buying all kinds of products, across categories. I’m not saying that Prime is a bad idea. In fact, a disproportionate amount of sales for Amazon India comes from its high-value Prime customers. But I suspect that Flipkart’s organisation structure is what is keeping it more nimble and able to fend off threats better, from multiple competitors. 

I’ll end with a final story, which was told to me by someone who used to work at Flipkart. 

One of the consequences of Flipkart’s vertical-first organisation is that it often leads to situations where business units come into conflict with each other. It could be for anything, maybe marketing resources, or spends, or exclusive partnerships. This isn’t unusual and it happens all the time at companies, but thanks to Flipkart’s structure, resolving this is a bigger challenge.   

At Flipkart, there’s a maxim that they use to resolve these disputes. 

It’s called “Flipkart First”.

Simply put, when faced with an internal conflict, the shibboleth is this—choose the course of action that will most benefit Flipkart. Ask anyone who works in Flipkart and they’ll tell you that “Flipkart First” is a statement that’s used all through the organisation, from top to bottom, as a conflict resolving mechanism, especially across business units. 

Think about that for a moment. 

How many organisations do you know that have to explicitly remind their employees to keep the interests of the company first? 

How many believe that it needs to be stated? 

Only a company that has truly crossed the chasm.