'E-Commerce Marketplace – Trust & Safety View' by Mr. Krishna Veer Singh, Director- Marketplace at Flipkart

The initial few minutes were a quick walk through the story of evolution of e-commerce in Indian context. This was coupled with Mr. Singh narrating his personal experience of first online purchase – the general scepticism among friends and relatives – which everyone sitting in the room could relate to. Then he went on to explain how buyer seller interaction improved, the watershed moment of the ecommerce industry and the buying cycle that followed. By citing eye catchy examples like – Apple vs Samsung – the speaker approached product and service sector concepts very subtly and within no time the entire room of above 100 students were actively interacting with him. The conversation then switched to ‘Marketplace’ in general and ‘ecommerce Marketplace’ in particular. Relating this to what we study in our day to day Marketing and Finance books, like – cost to capital concept, controlled processes, market positioning etc. - was something that went on making the interaction more and more binding.

We were then introduced to one of the domains of Mr. Singh’s expertise, ‘Trust & Safety’. After giving us an overview of the numerous trust and safety issues existing in the ecommerce industry, Mr. Singh went on to take diverse questions – MRP issues, reviews issues, fake customers etc. – and adding a tinge of personal industry experience to his answers, he so subtly managed to clear our doubts that we could hardly feel that we were completely new to this topic of discussion. All of this was then related to the current Flipkart scenario and what they were doing to overcome these issues.

The best part of the lecture was that, at every point our thought process was directed in such a manner that we would come up with the answers to our own questions. And also, it did not end with this ecommerce topic related discussion. We were given insights as to how we need to manage this B-school phase and make the best out of it. Learning from someone who has already played the game and emerged winner will not ensure your success, but will surely help you in understanding the rules of the game better. And Mr. Singh explained the rules really well.