Namah Chawla
Marketing

Social commerce is an entry point to e-commerce for non-metro consumers: Myntra's Arun Devanathan

Ahead of its 'End of Reason Sale', the e-commerce platform recently hosted its Creator Fest to celebrate the first year of M-live.

Last year, Myntra diversified its social commerce offering, with the launch of its live shopping platform, M-Live. As M-Live completes a year, the e-commerce platform recently hosted its first Creator Fest. The aim of the Creator Fest was to enable the e-commerce platform to connect with its network of influencers, while also helping them accelerate their growth journey.

Speaking to afaqs!, Arun Devanathan, senior director, social commerce, Myntra, says that the core thought behind launching M-Live was to recognise that consumers are looking for shopping models beyond traditional e-commerce. “In its early stage, M-Live focussed on building conviction amongst various stakeholders.”

Then, the consumers were looking for engaging shopping experiences, brands wished to build connection with audiences, and creators were looking to create shoppable content and build their following. During its initial stage, Myntra’s aim was to build value for each of the social commerce platform’s stakeholders.

As per Devanathan, “Some of the early brands that participated with Myntra, included Libas, Tokyo Talkies and Lakme. As we have built this up through the course of the year, we have been able to scale it up as well. We have witnessed five times growth in traffic on our social commerce platform. This has also led to double the engagement from what we had seen initially.”

Today, China is one of the most mature markets for live commerce. Brands there have been using live commerce for the last five years and have now scaled up significantly. As per industry reports, it is a $150 billion live streaming market that attracts about 500-600 billion customers annually. Its contribution to the annual revenues of the country's e-commerce industry is 10-15%.

The growing digital boom, backed by higher Internet and smartphone penetration, is aiding the growth of social commerce in India. According to Statista, the Indian social commerce market is currently worth $7 billion and is likely to increase to $84 billion by 2030. 

M-Live’s goal is to facilitate the widespread adoption of social commerce. Devanathan reveals that the early adopters of the platform are the young and digitally-savvy Gen Z crowd.

Interestingly, M-Live has also seen a lot of traction from non-metro audiences. “Social commerce is an entry point for e-commerce for non-metro users,” Devanathan adds.  

Myntra’s Style Squad Program works with creators on a long-term basis that the e-commerce platform later leverages for M-Live. On the back of its success, the Style Squad Program is being expanded. 

“We are expanding the beauty squad to include 80-plus creators and onboarding experts, like makeup artists and dermatologists. This is also helping Myntra to create deeper partnerships with the creator ecosystem.”

Elaborating on the categories of brands for which this format works well, Devanathan says, “We have seen that static content works great, when it comes to fashion, while video on live content works very well for beauty.”

Devanathan also says that over the coming months, the focus will be on deepening the work that Myntra does with its creator ecosystem and brands. “We will be getting a diverse set of creators onboard. We will significantly increase the categories of brands and give them access to our creators.”

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