How Myntra is strategising the social commerce path through creator economy

Myntra recently announced its foray into Social Commerce at scale. As a part of this launch, Myntra also unveiled M-Live, bringing a first-of-its-kind, interactive and real-time live shopping experience to the fingertips of millions of shoppers in the country. Paving the way for immersive and informative shopping with its Social Commerce proposition, Myntra believes that the charter is likely to engage ~50% of its monthly active users in the next 3-4 years. Myntra aims to churn out close to 1000 hours of live video content per month for deeper consumer engagement, contributing exponentially to the creator economy phenomenon.

With the launch of its Social Commerce charter, Myntra is looking to transform the way consumers shop by bridging the gap between inspiration and commerce while bringing both under one single platform. M-Live will aim to facilitate a real-time engagement between consumers and brands by allowing influencers and experts to host live video sessions of product and styling concepts curated by them, on the Myntra app, enabling viewers to shop instantly.

In an interaction with Adgully, Achint Setia, VP and Business Head, Social Commerce, Myntra, speaks about the platform’s foray into social commerce, engagement with the huge community of influencers, projections on the overall sales from social commerce, insights on the M-Live shopping experience and more.

Please share some insights on the key elements of Myntra’s Social Commerce foray.

Social commerce for us comprises the entire content and influencer-led commerce that we are investing in, with a particular focus on fashion, beauty and personal care. We engage with our most prominent influencers who inspire our customers to shop. We at Myntra are building an ecosystem of content creators/ influencers, customers and brands to come on a common platform, engage with each other in communities and also for brands to find new ways of exciting their followers.

The ecosystem which we are creating as a marketplace includes three elements: M-Live, which is a live promise proposition and offers an immersive experience led by trusted influencers in an interactive manner. It is brought to life at the click of a button, where you can get a lot of information and can ask questions related to quality material. The influencer plays a key role, where they should be good enough to answer the questions in their particular area. It also gives users the opportunity to shop as a community and benefit from the community’s knowledge, observations, questions, and comments, enabling a more confident shopping decision that is backed by social validation.

The second part is our On Demand content destination, which has been there for some time, but it has scaled up quite well in the last six months, particularly at 20% of our monthly active users who are listing and using the platform (Myntra Studio). We have a lot of content from our influencers and brands on a variety of topics, including fashion, beauty, advisory and inspiration.

The third is Season 3 of Myntra Fashion Superstar, which is now live. The idea is to invest in the theatre economy and give a platform to budding creators in the fashion space in this country, who come from the emerging markets and find a new space. It’s a digital first show that provides a very unique opportunity as it also invites a lot of our customers not just for the entertainment, but also shop a lot of these stuffs. These are the three key elements specifically that are helping in building social commerce at Myntra.

How are you bringing these influencers onboard and what are the criteria to select the influencers?

What do customers need? They need to be entertained, inspired and get specific advice from the influencers whom they listen to or look up to. This means that an influencer needs to influence decisions and be an entertainer to hold the audience’s attention for 30-45 minutes. They need to be really good at what they do, which is fashion and beauty, in our case. We go deep with these influencers and understand what they are really good at and help them curate their own sessions and their products from the Myntra platform and then get into interacting with the customers.

What prompted Myntra to foray into the social commerce space at this point in time?

It is about finding the right product-market fit for the platform to enter this space and to benefit the customers as well. Myntra has been in the market for 14 years now, while Myntra Studio has been there as a destination for more than a year and a half. These two elements have allowed us to experiment with a lot in the cable economy. By engaging a lot with our customers we have learnt what kind of content in the commerce model of influencers works for our customers. With this foray, Myntra aims to let our customers experience the best shopping advice on their fingertips.

What kind of strategy and deals do you have for the creators to keep them engaged?

Influencers have high potential and are extremely passionate about what they do, and through the Myntra Studio, M-LIve and Myntra Fashion Superstar, they can get to an audience who loves fashion. While they may be on other platforms too and get some traction there, but because Myntra believes in fashion and beauty and the love that they get from our audiences to also be part of the same community, it provides a big opportunity to them.

Being able to demonstrate these technologies, Myntra has invested in the live stream commerce in its own proprietary technology. There are a lot of specific nuances set in mind in terms of colours, in terms of the live latency when you are streaming live, in terms of particular audiences that you can have in these live sessions and a lot more. A lot of these things have been built in the engagement context, or industry context on other platforms.

Augmented reality based online shopping will be another very novel thing for the influencers as they will be able to not just entertain people, but also inspire them to shop. They see this as an opportunity in the future that is available to other platforms that have a particular condition, but in Myntra, it could open up new windows for them.