Eureka Forbes, part of the conglomerate Shapoorji Pallonji Group, is currently one of the world's largest direct sales company known for its water purifier brand Aquaguard with a turnover of more than INR 30 billion. The company is estimated to have a customer base of 20 million across 53 countries. The company's distribution channel includes a direct sales force of dealers, institutional channels, business partner network and a rural channel across 1500 cities and towns in India. The company's previous customer acquisition model ensured that interested customers were individually visited for demonstration of the product and for completion of purchase. While this made the company a household name, it kept the acquisition costs on the higher side. With the imminence of online retailing, the brand had been taking steps to establish their digital presence and build a stable online sales channel. The company website (www.eurekaforbes.com) attracts online traffic from various sources such as organic searches, google ads, email campaigns, etc. The company has started to use this click stream data to build a rich database of visitor acquisition factors and behavioral variables such as session duration, device category, pages visited, lead forms filled, etc. using the Google Analytics Reporting API. The company identifies these visitors as potential customers and is actively deploying remarketing campaigns with optimism to convert them. While these campaigns have shown some success, they have resulted in substantially high retention costs. The business goal is clearly defined for the company - they want to target potential customers while keeping the cost per lead (CPL) as low as possible. For Kashif Kudalkar, the Deputy General Manager for Digital Marketing and Analytics, the task is to achieve better conversion at lower costs. This is achievable when the target audience is narrowed down to a sizeable number for remarketing campaigns.

Bigbasket was India's largest online grocery and food store established in 2011 by a group of entrepreneurs Hari Menon, Vipul Parekh, V S Ramesh, V S Sudhakar, and Abhinay Choudhari. In 2016, Bigbasket sold more than 18,000 products and 1,000 brands operating across 12 Indian cities. Online grocery market in India has been small, but a rapidly growing segment. According to "The Retailer" Ernst and Young's publication in consumer products and retail sector, during July-September 2015, India was among the top-10 food and grocery markets in the world, with an estimated size of INR 22.5 trillion (approximately USD 350 billion). The market has grown at 10-12% CAGR between 2010 and 2015, with food and grocery being the largest segment, accounting for close to 60% in 2015 alone. The protagonist of the case, Pramod Jajoo, Chief Technology Officer, at Bigbasket was trying to solve two problems frequently encountered by customers of online grocery stores. It was estimated that about 30% of Bigbasket customers place orders through smart phones. Unlike other e-commerce companies such as Amazon, Bigbasket customers place order for several products in a single order, sometimes as high as 80 in one order depending on their purchase frequency. When the basket size is high, using smart phones to place order is challenging. Also, it is a common phenomenon that customers forget to place order few grocery items which may result either in placing additional orders or customers purchasing those products from neighborhood stores resulting in a financial loss to online grocery stores. Jajoo and his team wanted to create a "Smart Basket" that would make placing orders easier for their customers and "Did you forget?" feature that would identify the items the customer may have forgotten to order.