At a time when India’s e-commerce segment is booming, customers look for getting that unique value proposition and this is largely being done with the help of giving cashback to customers.
Keeping this in mind, LafaLafa.com has emerged as a platform that can generate extra cashback for customers. Yosha Gupta, CEO & Founder, LafaLafa.com speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the company’s core focus and its future plans.
What are some of the core focus areas for lafalafa.com ?
Our core focus is to offer double savings of coupons and extra LafaLafa cashback to price conscious consumers for all their online shopping and recharge. We launched our website www.Lafalafa.com about 6 months ago and our android app http://tinyurl.com/perk2nf 3 months ago. Our app has already touched 200,000 downloads in less than 3 months and transactions have grown by 1000% month on month over the last 3 months.
We see huge traction when our partner stores run app only promotions like Flipkart’s Big App Shopping Days last June – our GMV definitely skyrocketed then. We plan to keep focussing on making it easier for our consumers to find the best offers and always get extra cashback on the go through our mobile app LafaLafa.
In an online scenario which is getting overcrowded – how do you plan to differentiate..?
Competition in the cashback segment is high which is a good thing as there’s huge scope for affiliate marketing in India with the growth of ecommerce – in developed economies affiliate marketing drives more than 30% of overall business for ecommerce stores which is still a small percentage in India so the more the merrier as it also leads to more customer education about the segment.
Other cashback businesses are only focussed on web while our sole focus is on mobile – we are the only ones who have launched a mobile app and we are getting huge learnings with app to app tracking, driving engagement using notifications, personalising content and offers – all of this is much easier on mobile which is why its our preferred channel and helps to drive more and more customers towards us. Mobile first is the way to go in India with 952 million + mobile users, mobile internet users expected to cross 213 million and smartphones expected to reach 500 million soon, the figures are uncomparable to web! We are also introducing a few interesting features soon based on conversations with lots of our customers.
Team LafaLafa.com
What are some of the big USPs for this App..? Why would consumers use it..?
Extra LafaLafa cashback for all online shopping and mobile recharge is the biggest draw for customers as this extra cashback is only available when customers visit these 500+ websites like flipkart, amazon, Jabong, Snapdeal, Paytm through us . As we are the only cashback business with a mobile app presence that’s a big USP for us as consumers can always get cashback on the go. Our tracking for cashback is much faster and we make our cashback payable instantly for some categories which consumers love as they dislike waiting for too long for their cashback to be payable. Good UX and ease of use is always a big differentiator as well.
What is your go to market strategy..? And your business model.?
Affiliate marketing is at the heart of our business where ecommerce businesses pay us a commission for driving customers with a high intent to shop on their websites or mobile apps and our customer proposition is that in addition to all other savings we also share a predominant part of this commission with our users as extra cashback. Our go to market strategy is to solely focus on mobile as our preferred channel for targetting consumers.
How big would be the market that you are addressing..?
To start with, it’s the ecommerce market we are addressing which is potentially valued at 20-25 billion USD for 2015, in fact out of the 10 billion USD of funding for Indian startups last year, 75% was actually in ecommerce companies, so you can imagine the scope for aggregators like us. And when we start expanding to in-store offers and extra cashback then it’s the entire retail market that we would be addressing.
What kind of innovations can we expect from LafaLafa in the near future??
Product search is available on our website as that helps to create the context to see the actual discounts and cashback on the product that consumers want to buy, we will soon be introducing this on our mobile app also. You will soon also see a very high level of personalisation on our app where we are able to show users very relevant offers based on their past shopping history through us for the stores and categories that they like.
Most importantly, you will see us offering discounts and extra cashback for all the other categories that are important for customers like resteraunts, groceries, we will be the go to platform that customers always think of for saving on anything that they want to buy.
