Exclusive Interview with Sonu Somapalan, Co-founder of Tenovia

Tenovia is an e-commerce analytics and consulting partner for retail and D2C brands with its focus on building and scaling their e-commerce revenues. The company is constantly guiding its clients and working with them to take full advantage of the e-commerce channel economics that we have mastered over the years. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sonu Somapalan, Co-founder of Tenovia.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialisation, and the services that your company offers.

Tenovia is an e-commerce analytics and consulting partner for retail and D2C brands with our focus on building and scaling their e-commerce revenues. We're constantly guiding our clients and working with them to take full advantage of the e-commerce channel economics that we have mastered over the years. From leveraging technology, identifying the right mix of digital channels, unlocking new revenue streams, and streamlining supply chains to providing a stellar experience to end users, we ensure our clients scale up in the e-commerce space.

We have an e-commerce Analytics SaaS product called Tensight – through which brands can get insights on merchandising, supply chain, warehousing, competitor tracking, e-commerce and digital marketing, customer insights and aggregated reviews/ratings.

We provide Consulting for data driven actionable and recommendations that should be prioritized by brands to maximise their e-commerce revenues.

How have you seen the evolution of the industry? As you said that you have been here from the beginning, how has the growth been? 

We'll break the evolution into two stages – pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. There was always a sense of caution against the e-commerce businesses and traditionally brands considered the channel a good to have. Post pandemic it's a must-have channel that's become a strategic initiative, especially with the burst of D2C brands that have tasted success on the channel.

Pre-pandemic, barring a few niche players who sensed the opportunity, most brands were concerned about the upfront investments and the thin margins the channel provides without fully valuing the wealth of customer access or data insights the channel can generate.
Post pandemic, brands have become more open to investments upfront for a 1-2 year period with more focus on customer acquisition and experience – and they are definitely reaping the benefits through a positive bottom line.

What are the key trends driving the growth in the e-commerce analytics space/ industry? How big is the e-commerce analytics space?

The e-commerce business is still relatively in its early years in India. There's a large base of potential buyer base that's yet to be tapped in its entirety for online transactions. While in mature markets e-commerce channel contribution is around 30% of the business, in India it still hovers in the single digits for most brands. Some categories lead others in online adoption. This is expected to shoot up over the next few years with more brands recognizing that online is an important channel to scale and nurture.

In 2022, most of the brands have done the basics for e-commerce. In the initial years, they grew aggressively year-on-year. But as the business got to a certain size, the rate of growth slowed down.

This is where Analytics steps in e-commerce Analytics give the brands a competitive advantage that can sustain the aggressive growth rates online.

Brands that consistently study their data, invest in analytics, and make day-to-day decisions based on analytics are definitely on the cutting edge in this space. Delayed decision-making is probably the single largest eroder of revenues in the e-commerce space.

That's the space in which we exist – democratizing the access to analytics across all stakeholders in the e-commerce team – enabling timely data-driven decisions that leads to increased top lines and healthier bottom lines.

We believe that the acceptance and demand for e-commerce Analytics will be widespread in a 9 – 18 months window.

AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of your products and services?

AI is already playing a key role in the retail space – where it has seen multiple use cases.

We've found tremendous success in using AI / ML to forecast and enable predictions – be it for sales, stock levels, or new product development for our clients.

And there are already pre-existing successful models in AI that we've been able to deploy with a very high success rate. Today we can forecast demand for products across channels with as high as 92% success rate. This will only get better as our AI / ML models learn through more data.

With AI – we estimate the cost of delayed decisions in our "Loss-of-Sale" analysis. This has helped teams within brands speed up their actions and decisions.

What is the reason that e-commerce players are using data analytics and recommendations tools? Can you elaborate on the e-commerce technology market?

Smart brands have realized that analytics can unlock revenue that is potentially left behind on the table, untapped. It can pinpoint the areas that are holding the brand back from achieving its next X revenues and identify the hiccups in the business.

Globally the e-commerce technology market is peppered with a whole host of products that are geared towards an Amazon or Walmart. Examples are Sellics or Repricer and they solve a very specific problem around either pricing or advertising.

In India, we are still playing catch-up. There are barely a handful of brands that use any analytics products and there is actually a dearth of comprehensive products that are integrated with channels like Flipkart or Myntra or Swiggy. They'll mostly be specific only to Amazon and that's a big gap for brands.

We've solved this problem with Tensight. With Tensight, brands can view and get a centralized analytics product that circumvents the need to have multiple different tools. Tensight also connects with almost all of the large and upcoming e-commerce channels, digital advertising platforms, popular Order Management Systems, and D2C eCommerce platforms – thus breaking multiple data silos and centralising all the data into one platform. This has enabled a cohesive alignment of multiple functions in the e-commerce team as they can see how metrics in one function affect metrics in the other. We've also seen the benefits of shrinking the learning curve for e-commerce teams by seeing the larger picture in a central e-commerce scorecard.

How does your company/product assist in the digital transformation of an e-commerce player? 

We have a very analytical approach to driving business revenues and optimizing the bottom line for our clients. Our intellectual property is the internal scorecards we build for brands and the subsequent analytics that gives a precise overview of the channel health and thus, the brand's ability to drive scale. Through our centralized analytics platform Tensight – we are better poised to derive insights from data across diverse touchpoints to which brands typically don't have access.

Could you highlight your company's recent innovations in the AI/ML/Analytics space?

We have recently launched a product called "Tensight". It is a robust analytical tool that centralises KPIs across multiple sources of data and simplifies decision-making for business owners/managers. We identified a key gap where e-commerce teams don't have access to real-time data and insights that prevents them from taking timely decisions – and with Tensight we aim to bridge this gap by providing a centralised analytics platform that different teams from the e-commerce function can use – be it supply chain, product, technology or marketing.

Can you elaborate on how e-comm players efficiently extract the value from data, without increasing cost and complexity?

Analytics is a competitive advantage for brands in the e-commerce space. Analytics has traditionally been very expensive – with a team of specialists in Data Engineering, Coding, Data Science, and AI/ ML being deployed to create bespoke solutions for large companies.

This is what we've broken through. With Tensight, e-commerce businesses can leverage the true power of AI / ML driven Analytics at a fraction of the cost via our SaaS platform. We've used our years of domain experience to organise data across multiple e-commerce functions so that users of Tensight can make timely data-driven decisions.

What do you think will be the key trends that will drive the growth for Tenovia and industry at large?

The growth of the e-commerce business with expansions into the smaller tiers, villages, and towns having access to cheaper internet, and brands willing to invest online – these are all trends that will enable us to scale. Businesses will need insights and analytics to make decisions online – which operates at a much higher clip than offline, and thus there will be a need to enable analytics across the board. We believe this is the prime period to ride the wave and add tremendous value to our clients in their journey.

Can you please elaborate on your business strategy and growth plans?

We are keen to enter into international markets with our analytics product Tensight as there is a commonality of problem statements that businesses face across markets and Tensight can solve them efficiently. Our top priorities would be to build expertise around deeper recommendations as our product AI gets more intelligent and thus deliver high-value insights to our clients. In the long term, we would like to be positioned as an advanced 'analytics and recommendation partner' globally for digital businesses.