The Indian ecommerce sector is still nascent, which means that even when a customer is searching for Myntra, she might be open to switching to Yebhi,” they were told.īut the companies decided they couldn’t bleed any more. “Why have you stopped bidding on competitive brand searches? This is very risky. According to insiders with access to what went on after this informal deal, some of the three apparel companies received calls from their sales contacts in Google. Naturally, CPC rates for brand search ads plummeted drastically, as companies were often the sole bidders for their own brand searches.īut this is where the story takes an interesting turn. A decision was taken to stop bidding on each other’s brand searches. With profits still a mirage and venture capital money fast running out, the companies put aside their fierce rivalry and reached out to each other informally. No matter how good your business is at a gross margin, they just skim the cream off everyone,” says the co-founder of one of India’s leading travel portals. “Google is sucking all the air from the ecosystem. But in their zeal to snatch potential customers a second or two away from clicking through to a rival’s website, and conversely to defend their own brand searches from rivals, they had all bid up the cost-per-click (CPC) rates for such ads through the roof (CPC is the money paid by an advertiser for every customer that clicks on its ad).Īs they saw it, Google was the proverbial monkey pretending to settle a dispute over a cake between two cats, while ending up eating the cake. ads shown to users who searched Google for, say, “ ” or “Jabong”. The three had been engaged in a bruising bidding war for ads related to their own “brand searches” Nearly one-third of the Rs 1.5-2 crore each of them was spending every month on Google search ads was spent on ambushing each other’s potential customers, often with little bang for the buck.
Sometime early this year, three of India’s biggest players in the space-Jabong, Myntra and Yebhi-came to a stark realisation. And among them, an increasing number think of Google as an adversary in the garb of a friend, someone who inserts himself between their customers and themselves, and charges what they see as an unreasonable tax on the oxygen essential to ecommerce. Whether it’s a web search, watching a video, using a browser, the operating system for smartphones or plain and simple email, Google is everywhere-and free.īut someone is obviously paying for it all. To the average indian internet user, Google is oxygen-omnipresent, free and essential to her existence.
0 kommentar(er)
