All things ecommerce with Amazon Pay's 1st PM
My chat with Sujayath Ali, Cofounder of India's Voonik & CBO of Bangladesh's ShopUp
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Not many people have worked on everything from payments and checkout to consumer retail, B2B marketplaces, lending, logistics, and supply chain management in the ecommerce landscape across the States, India, and Bangladesh over the past two decades.
The ex-CEO of India’s Voonik (inspired by Stitchfix) and the current CBO of Bangladesh’s ShopUp (a parallel to India’s Udaan), Sujayath, is one of those people.
Amazon’s foray into payments
He was the first product manager for Amazon Pay back in 2005-2008.
Origins: “In 2005, Amazon Payments started as a developer offering as part of AWS. The idea was to create programmable money to facilitate payments between APIs without requiring human intervention,” Sujayath told me. “It would have been more relevant today with the advent of cryptocurrencies, but it was ahead of the market then.”
They later moved to the ecommerce checkout market. PayPal was the only player at the time, and they redirected users to the PayPal website.
“My idea was to provide a one-click solution without redirection so that the entire checkout could be completed within the merchant website,’ he said.
“However, we couldn’t get the traction we wanted as the product required customers to use their Amazon accounts which the merchants were skeptical about.”
Fast forward 15 years today, the war for owning checkout on merchant websites has been intense amongst BNPL players, one-click checkout players, first-party platform offerings, and various payment methods.
“I believe whoever provides the one-stop experience, including fulfillment and post-order operations, will win.”
Differences in designing checkout for the US versus India: “First, credit cards are insignificant in India. Checkout needs to be optimized for UPI and COD (cash on delivery). Second, India is a mobile-first market, and checkout needs to be mobile-first. Third, two-factor verification is mandatory in India, so the checkout must seamlessly do this verification. Fourth, multi-device buying is increasing in India, and checkout needs to consider QR codes, shared accounts, etc., to span across devices,” he explained.
The first startup in India inspired by StitchFix
In 2013, he started Voonik, a personal styling service back in 2013.
“My original idea was to use AI/ML and create a personal shopping service. However, there were no takers for that.”
Voonik later transitioned into a marketplace. A Myntra for unbranded fashion, as he calls it. Myntra is a fashion and lifestyle marketplace founded in 2007 as a retailer and was bought in 2014 by Flipkart, which Walmart now owns.
He believes Myntra could provide a great experience for brands because of the available structured data on SKUs. Amazon and Flipkart could not do that for unbranded fashion due to a lack of that data.
The opportunity in unbranded fashion: “Long tail merchants don’t spend time on data such as patterns, sleeves, collars, etc. There is no standardization. For the same item, one merchant might say, Maroon, the other might say Brown, and another calls it Red,” he said. “This would impact the search, filter, personalization, and a lot more. We already had a best-in-class AI/ML solution to create structured data from image reading. We were able to create the Myntra experience for unbranded items. We did a trial, and it was very successful.”