High margin, High volume, High velocity – Which do you prefer?

Let's say we have three products: high margin and low volume, low margin and high volume, and low margin and fast selling. Which product do you want to sell as an entrepreneur? Generally, the most common answer is that we should sell the highest margin product. But, from an Return on Investment (ROI) or Return …

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Deficit Financing and Inflation Explained Simply

Normally, any entity spends basis its earnings or how much money is in their bank. But, governments are an exception to this behavior. If government has to spend, they spend. They may not exactly care if they have the money to spend or not. If they don’t have the money, governments will simply print some …

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Prime Costs, Conversion Costs, BOM and GP in Manufacturing

When you talk to manufacturers, they frequently use a term called ‘conversion costs’ and a few of them also use the term ‘Prime Costs’ (especially used by Chinese vendors). A typical manufacturer would look at charging you as below: So, you could guess: Conversion Cost is the total cost that is borne by the manufacturer …

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Monetary and Fiscal Policy during Covid19

It is now very clear that the economic impact of Covid19 is going to be far greater than anything that we've seen in the last fifty years, and far greater than the 2008 global financial crisis. People who are poor and middle-class are going to be the most hit in this situation world-wide especially in …

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Furniture E-commerce Marketplace – The Four Major Challenges

It is now clear that India has two large online marketplaces, Amazon and Flipkart, with Paytm and Snapdeal losing steam in the last five years. All these platforms have largely grown in size with electronics being the major contributor and the primary reason for the consumer-pull (with discounts on top brands). Electronics, followed by other …

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E-commerce Marketing Touchpoints, Channels, Funnels and Attribution

Rarely will a buyer click your advertisement, fill in the details, read a blog post, then purchase your product in one single continuous journey; the journey is just not that linear. Customers evolve w.r.t. their awareness, trial, usage and brand/product loyalty across time and across devices and platforms. Therefore, how you want to develop a touchpoint …

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Cost of Capital and IRR, Explained!

When you take a loan, you pay an EMI for the loan at a specific rate of interest, which is the bank's rate of return. Similarly, when you invest in a home and lease it to a tenant, the returns you get are the monthly rent and the final underlying asset value. So, each investment …

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Laundry Machines Needed To Start a Commercial Laundry in India

This article was contributed to Brandalyzer by Austine D'Souza. Austine is a co-founder of a Lonavala based laundry startup and has successfully run the business for 4 years. He works at IIT Bombay currently, and blogs on machine learning at http://www.zerosnones.net. As seen in the previous article, the laundry machines that are used for B2C and …

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Laminate vs. Veneers and Plyboard vs. MDF vs. Particleboard

Not every furniture that is in brown color is made of actual wood! Don't make this mistake especially if you are in the market to buy furniture. At a broad level, wood comes in three categories - solid-wood, soft-wood, and wooden boards. Solid wood formats are teak, rosewood, mahogany, beech, oak, mango wood, etc. Soft-wood …

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Top 9 online furniture rental websites/companies in India

The Indian online furniture rental market, including furniture, home decor, and appliances, is estimated to be a $1.5 to $2 Billion market by 2020. This is only a fraction when compared with the overall furniture market size of close to $32 Billion. With millennials increasingly becoming mobile in the way they live and work, renting furniture …

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ROI of a distributor or supplier – business turnover, margins and rotations (in e-commerce and FMCG)

Retail excites me a lot because it is a simple business of buying and selling goods and yet it covers almost every complexity under the sun. It has a complex supply chain from raw material to finished goods, yet seeming so simple and convenient when we add items to our shopping cart in offline and …

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How the visibility budgets are used for price undercutting in FMCG?

If you speak to any Territory Sales In-charge or Manager (TSM) of a large FMCG company, they are going to mention one huge problem called price undercutting that affects their daily work. In an earlier post, I have written about how the wholesale trade leads to price undercutting. In this post, I am going to write about …

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The Smartphone Boom in India

India has about 600+ million mobile phone users with about 800+ million subscriptions (SIM Cards base). About, 60% of these users are in Urban India. Now, imagine converting all those mobile users to smartphone users. Thanks to its population, India is a huge market for smartphone manufacturers. In the coming 2 years, smartphone manufacturers look …

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How Price Undercutting happens via Wholesale Trade?

Wikipedia defines price undercutting as: 'Price cutting, or undercutting, is a sales technique that reduces the retail prices to a level low enough to eliminate competition'. It is obvious that price under-cutting happens mostly to boost volume sales. This article is about how undercutting works in the context of Indian FMCG. Brief Overview of the …

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The buzz about Twitter, TV, and Nielsen

What is Twitter for TV ? Historically, TV viewers have always liked to discuss and debate about TV shows. People always talked about that particular cricket shot, actor, and that movie scene as they watched TV in their drawing rooms. But, the discussion was traditionally limited (geographically) to people inside the room. Twitter for TV allows you to tweet your ‘talk’ …

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E-commerce in India

As per IAMAI, the current number of Internet users in India is around 150 million users (~50 million in Rural) growing at a CAGR (2010-12) of 40%. This number is expected to grow to around 300-350 million by 2015. This means 30% of India is online covering most of the Urban India, which is where …

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The Modern Trade Consumer in India

With increased exposure to global brands, latest internet communications, and desire for better lifestyle, the consumers today are looking to use the global, trendy, life-style oriented products and are demanding more in terms of the shopping experience, simplicity, quality products, and value. The evolution of Modern Trade is just meeting the demands of these consumers …

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Wholesale market in India

Wholesellers are none but middlemen who buy products from distributors (wholesale/retail) and sell them to retailers. In most cases, the retailers come to the wholesellers to buy products to replenish their stock. However, wholesellers may also sell to end consumers, but such sales are minimal. In the Indian FMCG market, we have broadly two types of wholesellers: 1. …

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Lucky Goldstar (LG) India

LG stands for Lucky Goldstar - the product of a merger of two South Korean commodities businesses - but over the decades with a steady stream of innovative consumer electronics and home appliances, consumers concurred with the conglomerate's backronym that Life is Good. LG Home Appliances (HA), the arm of the Korean giant, which makes …

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