Birthday trip to the Taj Mahal

Had a memorable birthday this time. We planned for an unplanned trip to Agra. Left Delhi at 2:30PM and reached the Taj Mahal just in time before tickets closed at 4:45PM.

Made possible by one of the best highways in India I’ve seen so far.

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And ofcourse the Taj Mahal..

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I’ll have to admit though, despite claiming myself to be otherwise, this place has the aura to inspire the romantic in anyone. Hence the couple photo to end the post :)

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Startup Idea: an ecommerce account aggregator

The problem
Ecommerce is ubiquitous in the developed world, and is fast gaining the same status in the developing world as well. Obviously, all ecommerce sites are not equal. Order tracking and customer support experience varies by a lot. And logging into each website to track your order is cumbersome. There are times when one is expecting multiple orders, but it is ‘work’ to keep a track of all of them and request for support.

The idea
All your ecommerce order history, all your order tracking information, all your customer support via one app. The global ‘Your Account’.

Why is it good for customers
Easy to keep a track of all your orders from one single app. Customer support tickets can be raised, tracked and replied from within this app. The app can automatically raise customer support tickets to the respective site if an order gets delayed. Potentially it can handle site specific return policies as well.

Why is it good for ecommerce companies
Instantaneous touchpoint with customers for gathering feedback and updating about order statuses. Order tracking integrations with popular couriers to reduce customer support costs. By automatically raising tickets for order delays, the company can respond early and prevent possible customer anger management.

Challenges
How to get stored to go through the trouble of integrating/supporting this app. The quick approach could be to get access to transactional emails of these stores and by parsing order information from emails to start with. Deeper functionality will only be possible with API level integration. I haven’t really figured this one out though.

Opportunities
Can be a CRM channel providing companies with a targeted messaging platform for feedback, surveys, promotional offers etc. Can scale globally.