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Aayush Agarwal

Staff Writer, The Ken • India Edition

Aayush covers businesses that are primarily Internet for The Ken. In his previous stint at Goldman Sachs, he spent slightly more than a year analysing investment opportunities in the China Internet space. A science graduate, he completed his postgraduate from the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode. Write to him if, among other things, you wish to talk about e-businesses, journalism or just offbeat career choices.

34 Articles published

Top Comments by Aayush Agarwal

As distress sales heat up among startups, Corp Dev is cool again

Hi Yeshwanth, The idea is that these larger businesses have solid, long-standing partnerships with companies nationwide for sourcing, logistics, and sales channels (say supermarket chains) and sometimes for export. As volumes and time of doing business with these partners have increased for these large businesses, it also leads to pricing and service benefits. These capabilities are hard to build for smaller businesses, especially when the cost to do business is increasing with the current market conditions.

Aayush Agarwal The Ken, Staff Writer

Flipkart alums' $400M Arzooo's bid to help electronics dealers take on Croma, Amazon faces bigger battles

Hi Hardik, Thank you for reading. The 30-50% is across the whole chain, from manufacturer to end customer, for non-branded products. For branded products (which end customers are more confident of buying online than non-branded products), this would be anywhere near about 15%, which gets down to 10-12% if the product is purchased from the super stockist. While I am not sure of the 4-5% final margin for eCommerce platforms (which make up 20% of the sales in the industry), I assume this would be after discounts, logistics and other blended costs.

Aayush Agarwal The Ken, Staff Writer

Why Swiggy is building a Shopify for local brands

Thank you Gokul! Based on my conversations with Swiggy employees, Minis seems to be all about smaller brands which cannot offer discounts like the ones on Cred. Cred user base is also niche and likely to be a subset of Swiggy's. Logistics is definitely something Cred has done well with and Minis is yet to solve. Minis is (and has to) go and build its own with 3PL, which is a factor of order volumes. One seller indicated that his ratecard with Bluedart for a Rs 500gm product is Rs 50 (vs Rs 80 on Minis). If Swiggy is able to build such and more volumes, they could do bring down the cost by half and charge, like Meesho manages to right now. But, you're right, it's a big challenge to get smaller cities to shop and pay.

Aayush Agarwal The Ken, Staff Writer

Why Swiggy is building a Shopify for local brands

Hi Vansh, You're right, its not intuitive to go to Swiggy to shop, and building this association will be Swiggy's biggest challenge. I do see a lot of these smaller sellers (with or without websites) putting up the link to their Minis on Instagram (the discovery) as it doesn't cost the seller. For the customer, I guess its lesser cognitive load for a customer, a cleaner and faster experience. It'll be interesting to see if they eventually do bring Minis under the loyalty program Swiggy One and if that makes a difference.

Aayush Agarwal The Ken, Staff Writer

Why Swiggy is building a Shopify for local brands

Hi Vishal, It's not very clear yet as Minis is still in pilot. However, if they do integrate this product into the network the infrastructure support will need to come through Swiggy (for free) and additional distribution facilitated through ONDC. This would solve Minis logistics problem as more partners will be available but it will hurts their ad revenues as the customer could complete the purchase through ONDC.

Aayush Agarwal The Ken, Staff Writer

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