Ola Electric Experience Centres as a Customer Acquisition Model

Industry & Competitive Context

India is the world's largest two-wheeler market by volume, and the electric two-wheeler (E2W) segment emerged as its fastest-growing sub-category through the early 2020s. According to Ola Electric's own Red Herring Prospectus filed with SEBI, E2Ws rose from a negligible base to approximately 5.4% of total two-wheeler registrations by fiscal year 2024. Ola Electric Mobility Limited, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Bengaluru, positioned itself as India's largest E2W manufacturer by registered units, citing a market share of roughly 34.8%–35% in FY24, up from about 5.7% in FY22, per its IPO documents.

The competitive set through this period included Ather Energy, TVS Motor Company (iQube), Bajaj Auto (Chetak), Hero Electric, Okinawa Autotech, and Ampere. Unlike these rivals, most of whom retailed through conventional multi-brand or franchised dealership networks, Ola Electric built its go-to-market approach around a direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales model: vehicles were configured, financed, and purchased through the Ola Electric app or website, with company-operated "Experience Centres" serving as physical touchpoints for test rides, demonstrations, and after-sales service rather than as conventional showrooms taking independent commercial risk.

Brand Situation Prior to the Experience Centre Rollout

Ola Electric was incorporated as a subsidiary of ANI Technologies (the parent of Ola Cabs) before being spun off as an independent entity when founder Bhavish Aggarwal took a controlling stake in late 2018 and early 2019, as documented in corporate filings cited in the RHP. A pivotal step in product development was the 2020 acquisition of Dutch EV startup Etergo B.V., whose scooter engineering underpinned the subsequent S1 series, launched commercially in late 2021 (TechRadar; company statements).

In its early commercial phase, Ola Electric relied primarily on online reservations and direct-to-doorstep deliveries rather than a physical retail network, a structural choice the company described in its DRHP as making it the first E2W OEM in India to offer an end-to-end online purchase journey at scale. As sales volumes grew, the absence of a large physical network became a constraint on trust-building for a high-consideration purchase, and the company began building out company-owned Experience Centres to support test rides, financing conversations, and after-sales servicing (Business Standard, May 2023; Ola Electric official statements).

Strategic Objective

Publicly stated objectives, drawn from official company communications, centred on three goals: (a) building "India's largest D2C automobile retail network," as the company described its own milestone on opening its 500th Experience Centre in Srinagar in May 2023 (Business Standard); (b) using physical infrastructure to support, rather than replace, the D2C online transaction model, preserving margin control while addressing the consumer need for a tangible pre-purchase experience; and (c), from September 2024 onward, extending distribution into Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns through an asset-light partner model, as stated in the company's official press release announcing its "Network Partner Program."

Bhavish Aggarwal, Chairman and Managing Director, was quoted in that release describing the D2C model as central to "sustainable business growth" and the Network Partner Program as a way to expand the network "with limited capital investment from partners" while positioning company-owned stores as the network's anchor.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

The Experience Centre rollout proceeded in clearly documented phases:

• 2021–2022: Commercial launch of the S1 and S1 Pro scooters conducted primarily through online reservation and direct delivery, with limited physical retail presence in this initial period.

• May 2023: Ola Electric announced its 500th Experience Centre, in Srinagar, describing this as the establishment of a comprehensive nationwide D2C presence and stating an intention to cross 1,000 centres within the year (Business Standard).

• October 2023: The company's DRHP disclosed 935 Experience Centres in operation at that date.

• By September 2024: The company's official press release stated it operated "nearly 800" company-owned stores a reduction from the October 2023 figure, though the release did not explain the change and no verified public source clarifies the reason for this specific decline.

• September 26, 2024: Ola Electric launched its "Network Partner Program" via official press release, onboarding 625 third-party partners at launch, with a stated target of 1,000 partners by the 2024 festive season and 10,000 sales-and-service partners nationally by end-2025. Combined with company-owned stores, the release targeted roughly 1,800 total touchpoints by the 2024 festive season. The release explicitly stated the program required "limited capital investment" from partners versus a traditional dealership model.

• December 19–25, 2024: Amid a sustained rise in customer-service complaints (detailed below), Ola Electric announced the opening of 3,200 new stores co-located with service facilities in a single push, taking total showrooms and service centres to 4,000 nationally a figure confirmed by Bloomberg (via Gulf News), the Free Press Journal, and Retail Insight Network, and announced by Ankush Aggarwal, the company's group head of financial services and retail auto business, at a live company event. Company statements at the time explicitly framed this expansion as intended to "address customer service issues" alongside geographic penetration into smaller towns.

• 2025: Regulatory scrutiny led to a contraction of the network in at least one state. In April 2025, per reporting citing Maharashtra transport authorities, RTOs inspected 146 Ola Electric stores in the state; 121 (approximately 82.87%) reportedly lacked a valid trade certificate, and 75 showrooms were shut down with 192 vehicles seized (Rushlane, citing state transport department data). Later 2025 reporting indicated that a large majority of Maharashtra showrooms had ceased operating (Cartoq, July 2025).

• Late 2025: Business Standard reported the company's announced plan to progressively upgrade existing service centres into "Hyperservice Centres," beginning with Bengaluru, as part of a further network restructuring (Business Standard, December 2025/January 2026 reporting window).

Positioning & Consumer Insight

Publicly available company communications frame the Experience Centre as a hybrid instrument: a showroom for test rides and financing guidance, and simultaneously a servicing hub, explicitly described as distinct from a "traditional franchise dealership." The underlying consumer insight, as far as it can be evidenced from company statements rather than inferred, is that a high-value, unfamiliar product category (electric two-wheelers, then still a minority of overall two-wheeler sales) required a tangible, in-person trust-building step test rides and face-to-face guidance on financing and after-sales service that a purely online D2C model could not fully provide on its own. This is corroborated by the company's own framing of the Experience Centre network as complementary to, not a replacement for, its digital transaction channel, and by the explicit purpose the company assigned to the December 2024 expansion: addressing service-related customer frustration rather than solely pursuing new-customer acquisition.

No verified public information is available on formal consumer research, brand-tracking studies, or third-party (e.g., RedSeer, BCG, McKinsey) analyses specifically examining consumer motivations for visiting Ola Electric Experience Centres. This case therefore does not attribute a specific research-based insight to the company beyond what its own communications state.

Media & Channel Strategy

Ola Electric's channel architecture, as documented across its RHP/DRHP and press communications, rested on two integrated layers: (i) the Ola Electric app and website as the primary transaction channel, handling configuration, financing, and delivery tracking; and (ii) the Experience Centre and, from late 2024, Network Partner network as the physical layer for test rides, in-person sales support, and servicing. The company has publicly described this as an omnichannel evolution of its original pure-online model, formalised through initiatives such as the Network Partner Program and the December 2024 store expansion.

Beyond physical retail, the company has used owned digital and social channels (including the Chairman's own X/Twitter account) for major network-expansion announcements, such as the December 2024 4,000-store milestone, and has staged branded annual events (e.g., "Sankalp") to unveil product and technology updates. No verified public information is available on paid media spend, advertising budgets, or specific digital-marketing campaign structures tied to Experience Centre footfall generation, as the company has not disclosed these figures.

Business & Brand Outcomes

Revenue and profitability (company filings): Ola Electric's revenue from operations grew from ₹373.42 crore in FY22 to ₹2,630.93 crore in FY23 and ₹5,009.83 crore in FY24 roughly a 90% year-on-year increase in FY24 per its RHP. Net losses over the same period were ₹784.1 crore (FY22), ₹1,472.1 crore (FY23), and ₹1,584.4 crore (FY24), a cumulative loss of ₹3,841 crore across FY22–FY24 (Inc42; Value Research, citing RHP data).

Market share trajectory: The company's E2W market share rose from approximately 5.7% in FY22 to roughly 35% in FY24 (IPO documents), but subsequently declined sharply according to vehicle-registration data reported by Entrackr and Cartoq: to about 27% by September 2024, and further to 17.35% in July 2025, down from 38.83% in July 2024 a reported year-on-year fall of more than 57%.

Quarterly performance post-IPO: Following its IPO (priced at ₹76/share, raising ₹6,146 crore, listing on August 9, 2024), Ola Electric reported revenue of ₹1,644 crore and a narrowed net loss of ₹347 crore in Q1 FY25; a net loss of ₹495 crore in Q2 FY25; and in Q3 FY25 (quarter ended December 2024), revenue of ₹1,045 crore (down 19.36% year-on-year) with a widened net loss of ₹564 crore and deliveries of 84,029 units (down 3% year-on-year), per Business Standard reporting of company results. By Q1 FY26 (quarter ended June 2025), reported figures show revenue falling to ₹828 crore from ₹1,644 crore a year earlier (roughly a 50% year-on-year decline) alongside a net loss of ₹428 crore (Cartoq, citing company results).

Stock performance: Ola Electric shares hit a 52-week high of ₹157.53 on August 20, 2024, subsequently fell to a record low of ₹64.68 on January 28, 2025, and were reported trading around ₹43.19 on November 12, 2025 down over 50% from the 52-week high (Business Standard; E-Vehicle Info, citing TradingView/NSE data).

Customer service and regulatory outcomes: Mint reported the company was receiving over 80,000 customer complaints per month via the National Consumer Helpline during the crisis period; the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) reportedly recorded over 10,000 complaints against the company between September 2023 and August 2024 and issued a show-cause notice in October 2024 alleging possible violations of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (reporting citing CCPA data). Reuters, based on visits to 35 service centres across 10 states between July and October 2024 and interviews with staff and customers, reported significant service backlogs, with repair waiting times ranging from three days to two weeks at multiple locations, and quoted a service manager in Thane describing monthly case volume rising from 200–300 to roughly 1,000 over four months. HSBC analysts, following visits to Ola service centres, were reported as noting that most centres appeared "overwhelmed" and that the company had not invested sufficiently in servicing capacity relative to sales volumes.

In April 2025, Maharashtra transport authorities reportedly inspected 146 Ola Electric stores, found 121 (about 82.87%) lacking valid trade certificates, and shut down 75 showrooms while seizing 192 vehicles (Rushlane, citing state RTO data); later reporting in mid-2025 indicated that a large majority of the state's showrooms had ceased operating. Separately, Wikipedia's company entry (reflecting aggregated public reporting) notes that Ola Electric ceased serving Goa from 2025, corresponding with earlier reports of over 2,000 vehicles left at Ola workshops in the state and a suspension of new vehicle registrations by Goa's Transport Department.

Strategic Implications

The documented record allows several evidence-based observations, framed as analytical questions rather than settled conclusions, since the company's own long-term profitability and network stability remain publicly unresolved as of the sources reviewed. First, a D2C model that eliminates a dealership layer can plausibly support very rapid volume and market-share growth in a nascent, subsidy-supported category (FY22 to Fy24 share growth from roughly 5.7% to 35%), but the case record indicates this same model can leave the physical service layer under-resourced relative to the sales layer, since servicing is capital- and labour-intensive in a way that pure online transaction facilitation is not a gap the company's own December 2024 store expansion explicitly targeted.

Second, the shift from a wholly company-owned Experience Centre network (935 centres per the October 2023 DRHP) to an asset-light Network Partner model (launched September 2024, targeting 10,000 partners by end-2025) mirrors a broader industry pattern in which capital-intensive early-stage distribution is later diluted through franchise-like arrangements once volume and brand recognition are established; the publicly stated rationale (lower partner capital requirement, faster scaling) is consistent with this pattern, though the company's own 2025 regulatory difficulties (unlicensed stores in Maharashtra) suggest that rapid network scaling, whether company-owned or partner-based, carries compliance risk when growth outpaces operational and regulatory readiness.

Third, the subsequent and substantial market-share decline (from approximately 38.83% in July 2024 to 17.35% in July 2025) occurred concurrently with, rather than before, the publicly documented service-quality issues, regulatory notices, and store closures an observable sequence in the public record, though the sources reviewed do not establish a formally quantified causal weighting between distribution-network issues, competitive intensity from Bajaj, TVS, and Ather, and broader company-level factors such as product quality complaints. Any claim asserting a precise causal share attributable to Experience Centre execution specifically would exceed what the available public sources support.

Discussion Questions

1. Given the documented sequence rapid Experience Centre expansion, followed by service-capacity strain, followed by a Network Partner asset-light pivot what does this suggest about the trade-offs between distribution speed and distribution quality in a category requiring both trust-building and after-sales servicing?

   
   

2. Ola Electric's own press release framed the Network Partner Program as preserving company-owned stores as the network's "anchor" while partners extend reach into Tier-2/3 markets. What risks does this hybrid ownership structure introduce for brand-experience consistency, based on the regulatory issues documented in Maharashtra in 2025?

   
   

3. The company's December 2024 expansion to 4,000 stores was explicitly linked, in its own communications, to addressing customer-service complaints rather than solely acquiring new customers. What does this reveal about the limits of using physical retail expansion as a response to a service-capacity problem rather than a distribution-reach problem?

   
   

4. Market share rose from roughly 5.7% (FY22) to 35% (FY24) during the period of most aggressive Experience Centre rollout, then fell to 17.35% (July 2025) during a period of regulatory action and store closures. What competing explanations, drawn only from the documented public record, would you weigh in assessing how much of this reversal is attributable to distribution-network execution versus other factors such as competitive entry or product-quality perception?

   
   

5. If you were advising Ola Electric's leadership using only the outcomes documented here (revenue, market share, complaint volumes, and regulatory notices), what would you recommend as the immediate distribution-network priority for the next fiscal year, and what public metric would you propose the company disclose to allow that recommendation to be evaluated externally?