Why can't Amazon and Flipkart come up with a call centre where we can call and place orders?

Technologically, this is certainly very feasible. I can tell from experience as people are trying to build apps like this on our platform, http://www.kookoo.in It will also not be very costly as you can design an IVR without human agents and direct ordering. Also, KooKoo integrates with payment gateways(including offline ones like GharPay :), http://blog.kookoo.in/2011/12/ivr-payments-using-kookoo-part-1.html) so you can pay for the product also over the phone. I have a lot more creative ideas which can be done on the phone. Feel free to reach out to met at chaitanya at ozonetel dot com and would love to discuss.

First of all, IVRS is so 1990s, flipkart and amazon are working hard each moment to reduce the friction for the users who want to buy something online. You can browse their entire catalog in 5 minutes and can make decision wisely by reading product description, seeing pictures, reviews and all possible models. If you want to order a shoe, how are you going to convey your choice? You are going to tell the CRO what your shoe size, then color, then material, then brand and then what not... if anything goes wrong what are you gonna do, Press * to reach the main menu? It would be very much inconvenient for both the buyers and the sellers and they won't be improving trust/relations with the customers, forget about the sales. If you mean books, movie DVD or 1 kg sugar as standard product, IVRS might be (i repeat might be) useful but again how much percentage of user base is going to do it this way? (1 out of 1000).  If you have browsed through amazon's catalog or flipkart's,  you would understand what are the enhancements they are bringing which would never be possible via TeleShopping. With the boom in smart phones and internet devices and kind of experience they present, i don't think any one would go for IVRS. If you argue about the non-internet users, then pull out the data like how many things they buy remotely, you will get your answers. Nonetheless, it was a very thoughtful of you to try to solve some sort of problem, but before making any move, analyse the data present in the market and go through the pros and cons of doing any thing. Be a customer who uses IVRS for first 3 months and try online shopping for next 3, If you feel IVRS in the thing, then share your experience with these e-commerce companies who are acting dumb in this kind of channel. Cheers!

Radio Taxi is a standard product. Try to book one via a call centre :) And then try using http://merucabs.com, http://taxiforsure.com, http://olacabs.com And then try using their smartphone apps. ~Costs bro costs! And yes, even with Indians-calling-Indians.

Well, I don't think that it is a bad idea. It will going to help the e-commerce company to widen its client base. Morever, in smaller cities where broadband Internet is not that prevalent or easily available in every home, phone bases services can help a lot.   Though, this requires a dedicated team which will handle the payments, the call-centre and advertising. So on the economic front, this seems to be somewhat an obstacle at the moment as the companies are still concentrating on their web audience capture.   Probably because e-commerce in India is still not very popular hence this is taking some time. The Indian companies are yet to stand anywhere near there brick-and-mortal (physical retail stores) counterparts. Though, whoever comes up with this first, will definitely going to have the first mover's advantage.

I would think how much extra revenue will this additional bring and weigh it against how much do I need to invest in making it happen. How many multi-lingual call centres would I consider opening?   Moreover online world is more seamless and has less touch points. User can read the product description, feedback and then decide to order. This reduces the risk of buying wrong stuff.   It's seldom the case that you exactly know the product inside out and don't need to compare it or read some user feedback.

Ecommerce Ads are pay per click or impression, hosting is pay as you use, payment is per transaction, if there is a way one can have a pay per call or pay per conversion type of service provided by a third party, many ecommerce websites will probably give it a try. The business would probably be a 'Call Center as a Service' offering where you signup for an initial fee(maybe 10,000 Rs) and then take a catalog from the ecommerce site, provide a unique toll free number per customer and then charge per customer or conversion. It will probably be a business that will be profitable when it reaches a particular scale. The only catch is it will probably be a Cash on Delivery only model.

Flipkart already has this feature where you can call their customer support and place a cash-on-delivery order. As also mentioned, online shopping is pretty intuitive where user can actually see and compare the product, but there are decent number of orders placed through telephone on Flipkart.

I second abhi! Moreover the increase in revenues would need to justify the costs required to set up such a system ( recruiting people , call centre space , training recruits) , which I don't think it would. But then again its just my opinion. When you have the Internet where all the information you need to know is consolidated , why would anyone resort to ordering through a call , which is definitely more time consuming and inconvenient.

There is potential demand for this but this is a working model that is not scalable. I dont know the exact numbers behind this but it could look like , for every 100 people who call, we need 2 call centre agents to service them. Out of these 100, 10 complete the order. Which means if you want a 1000 orders in a day from this channel, you need to staff 20 people. Ecommerce is already razer thin margins and if you were to add a operational cost like this, it is definitely not scalable.