Where Singapore lags behind India in retail tech, and opportunities hide

Ace Turtle CTO Kapil Bhatia at the Bangalore command center of its omnichannel tech platform for retail brands. Photo credit: Malvika Tegta

When you place an order for Puma shoes on Lazada or Amazon, who “owns” the consumer – the brand or the marketplace? In a sense, it’s the marketplace, because of all the customer data it captures. But brands are now attempting to reclaim the consumer, with help from third-party retail tech innovators.

One of these is Bangalore-based Ace Turtle, which has been working with global brands like Puma, Fossil, and Ray Ban in India since 2014 to integrate their multiple online and offline retail channels.

A brand was losing control because its customer was owned by Amazon or Flipkart. Now they are saying I need to own this customer. That’s a big change happening.

Puma, for instance, had a siloed approach with separate teams handling various channels. That’s where Ace Turtle came in with its Rubicon tech platform. Now all orders and fulfilment transactions could be channeled through Rubicon and tracked. This created multiple possibilities.

Inventory could be dynamically switched between channels, for instance, instead of running into situations where there was too much inventory in one marketplace and too little in another one. Fulfillment could be more efficient with one view of all orders, transactions, and inventories. It also enabled “one customer view” instead of separate identities for the same customer on different channels.

“As a consumer today, you go to a retail store say on weekends, but at night you are on your apps shopping. But it’s the same consumer who is shopping for the same brands across multiple channels. So, this consumer has become omnichannel and hence organizations are changing to become omnichannel,” explains Ace Turtle COO and co-founder Berry Singh.

Knowing the consumer

Brands also want to engage directly with consumers. Earlier, it was only the marketplaces like Amazon or Lazada that could have a wealth of customer data for personalization, campaigns, and so on. But a platform like Rubicon could help a brand in owning rich customer data from all its transactions with marketplaces as well as offline stores and its own brand.com. Every order placed anywhere for a Puma product and its fulfillment goes via Rubicon and can be stored and analyzed.

Ace Turtle COO and co-founder Berry Singh. Photo credit: Ace Turtle

“What was happening in a sense was that a brand was losing control because its customer was owned by Amazon or Flipkart. Now they are saying I need to own this customer. That’s a big change happening,” says Singh.

The need to know the consumer becomes more pressing with the growth in cross-border business. Hence the expansion of Ace Turtle into Malaysia and Singapore, where it has partnered with last-mile logistics company Ninja Van. This also serves its existing clients which sell into these markets.

Local logistics and payment gateways are vital for Ace Turtle to help retail brands manage transactions on various marketplaces, their own websites, and offline shops.

In some ways, the ecosystem for this is more developed in India than in Southeast Asia. The entry of Amazon in 2013 and its ongoing battle with well-funded local rivals like Tencent-backed Flipkart and Alibaba-backed Paytm helped develop the Indian ecommerce ecosystem. The national digital ID Aadhaar and government-backed unified payments interface (UPI) are also helping bring down costs of digital transactions and making them more reliable.

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