Flipkart moves fast

Several months ago, when Prabhu Kumar could not find a book he wanted in bookstores here, he found it online at Amazon.com for $10. But he had to pay more than $9 in fees to have Amazon ship it to him.

Kumar, a software programmer, said he would not be doing that again. He now shops on India's answer to Amazon - FlipKart.com - which delivers books, phones and other items in as little as 24 hours at no extra cost. Kumar doesn't have to pay FlipKart a single rupee until a courier bearing his books arrives at his door. He can then hand over cash or a credit card.

"I think it perfectly fits the Indian mentality," Kumar.

While dozens of electronic commerce firms have recently sprung up to capitalize on India's growing Internet use, they have a problem. Indians are not yet comfortable with shopping on the Web. Many of them remain unwilling to use credit cards online. So the Indian retailers have gone to great lengths to gain customers. Customers may pay in cash on delivery, and the company fields delivery squads to ensure shipments get to customers quickly.

Full report here Economic Times

Flipkart tries to outdo Amazon

When they were starting out, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal would get on a motorbike to make the rounds of book warehouses across Bangalore, ride back to their two-bedroom apartment and package orders for online customers.

It was a humble beginning for two former software developers for Amazon.com who set out in 2007 to beat their one-time employer at its own game long before Amazon entered India.

“We were doing everything ourselves for the first four to five months, from packing to shipping,” Sachin Bansal, the 30-year-old chief executive of the company they called “Flipkart”, recalled of the six months before they moved into their first office. “Because our volumes were very low, our courier partners would sometimes refuse to pick up items from our apartment.”

“So we used to get on a motorbike, hold the shipment in our hands and personally deliver them to our Bangalore clients,” he said.

In those rocky first days, Sachin Bansal said, their suppliers, seeing two youngsters who had quit stable employment with Amazon, the world’s top online retailer, to go it alone, would counsel them to get proper jobs. The two men have since been cheered at home as poster boys for entrepreneurial India, establishing their company, Flipkart, as a leader in the fledgling Indian e-commerce market.

Full report here Deccan Herald

"Trust more important than lower prices"

E-commerce or online shopping is expected to grow by 47% this year. A whole bunch of websites have been increasing marketing spends and most of it is visible in some high frequency TV advertisements.
One of the leading companies in this pace is Flipkart. The co-founders and chief executive officer Sachin Bansal joins from the headquarters of the company in Bengaluru to talk more about online shopping and Flipkart. Here is the edited transcript of his interview. Also watch the accompanying videos.

What has been propelling this huge surge in online shopping? What has changed in the environment resulting in this spurt?
Customer trust has become much better in the whole medium. E-Commerce in the last decade has been suffering from a lack of customer, which has changed now. More and more e-commerce players with better services, better product selection and better prices are driving the market.

Low prices of the books category are one of the key attractions for people on Flipkart. Are low prices not the biggest driver for Flipkart’s sales?
Low prices are secondary to trust. If the consumers trust in your service is low, low prices will not help you much. We did a lot of experiment with prices earlier on when we started.
Most of the experiments and research showed that the first hurdle for consumers was trust and after that, the consumer thinks about prices or selection.
We are giving out three messages to our customers right now – one, helping with any problem related to the products; two, willing for a replacement and promising cash on delivery and card on delivery for customers; and third, providing customers with original product and a warranty.
Here, customers don’t have to pay upfront and then worry about the product not being delivered. When we combine all these factors, we see a very smooth shopping experience online as well as offline. All these factors would lead to growth for the company.

Full interview here Moneycontrol

NEA keen on Flipkart's $150-mn funding

NEA, the US-based venture capital major with $11 billion in committed capital, is understood to have shown keen interest to fund Bangalore-based Flipkart, an online retailer of books and lifestyle accessories such as mobile phones, consumer electronics, music, games among others.

According to investment bankers in the know, Flipkart is understood to be in discussions with a few global private equity and venture capital firms to raise about $150 million shortly. General Atlantic Partners is reportedly among the front runners to invest in Flipkart. Investment bankers detail that NEA will invest $40-$50 million and the rest will be from another PE major which has the bandwidth to write cheques to the tune of $100 million in one deal.

If this fresh fund-raising fructifies, it will be Flipkart’s fourth round of funding since starting in 2007.
The company had earlier raised a total of $30 million in two tranches from Tiger Global — $20 million earlier this year and $10 million during 2009. Prior to this, it had raised early stage VC from Accel Partners. The management of NEA and Flipkart could not be reached for their comments.

Founded in 2007 by two IIT graduates — Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal — Flipkart cracked the Top 100 Indian sites and was credited for being India’s largest online bookseller with over 10 million titles on offer catering to over a million customers.

Full report here Business Standard

Setting up flipkart.com

Preface
Browse, click and wait. Online book-shopping should really be a breeze. But all too often, in India, the wait turns endless, and frustration mounts. There could be disappointment in store at various levels. Either the book is out of stock, or the book arrives late, or sometimes never arrives. It is the freedom from this frustration, and the unfailing efficiency of its service that has contributed to making Flipkart.com the most popular Web site to buy books in India. At a recent e-commerce event organised by VC Cirlce in Bangalore, not a session went by without a reference to Flipkart. One panelist remarked that if Flipkart had not launched in 2007 and if makemytrip had not gone for an IPO, we would not even be talking about e-commerce in India today.

Characters
Sachin and Binny Bansal (not related to each other, but friends since their school days), engineers, book lovers, travel buffs and founders of Flipkart.com

Chapter 1
– The Beginning –
Sometime in 2006, Sachin and Binny Bansal found themselves at the Bangalore centre of Amazon.com. The two young engineers were drawn into the entrepreneurial, technology-obsessed and metric-driven culture of the firm that swore to be the earth’s most customer centric company. There were stories of how Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, would visit the warehouses and get his hands dirty, never failing to get a valuable insight or two in the process.

And of course, there was the engineer’s focus on efficiency — the urge to automate and measure in order to make better decisions. Sachin and Binny Bansal could get a definite sense of what it takes to succeed in e-commerce: A relentless focus on the back-end. This insight eventually helped them when they set upon their entrepreneurial journey.

Full report here Forbes

Words’ worth

Will online book stores be the nemesis of their brick-and-mortar cousins?

Middle school is probably the worst place for a nerd to be in. It's what a cocktail party is to a good K-serial bahu. What McDonalds is to a card-holding communist. And right at the heart of the whirlwind of adolescent hormones, stood the very own panic room. A soberly lit room that smells of paper and words, that indulges a spine to be colourful, and not necessarily uptight. The only place where a nerd society I knew very well, would feel cooler than the middle-school fest queen. Bookstores, have stood for several such slam-book-perfect stories, before an Amazon gatecrashed into their quiet fairytale. And took not long to prove that we were only to willing to have our books delivered at our doorstep.

When Barnes and Noble announced a sell-off, they only made a formal validation of the guilt that we have been living with for some time now. “When you have something definite in mind, buying a book from an online portal is only more convenient. Also, while a brick and mortar bookstore can house not more than 50,000 titles at a time, an online store usually stocks 3-4 million titles. Also discounts offered by these portals are more,” says Sachin Bansal, CEO of Flipkart.com, India's answer to Amazon. Ritam Haldar, a media professional, would agree. “What matters is the book. And we can even browse the latest titles on these portals. And the time you take to buy a book on these portals is what you take to update your Facebook status,” says Haldar, emphasizing the demands of a Twitter-happy generation.

Full report here Indian Express

Indian book retail industry goes online; book e-tailing to take off

According to a Technopack Advisors report of 2008, the Indian book market is valued at around $2.6 billion and less than one percent of India's $2 billion book industry comes from the online segment. Hence, the internet has a good potential for India's book retail industry.

On the releasing day of Dan Brown's novel The Lost Symbol, in September 2009, Flipkart.com, an Indian online book retailer, sold over 2,000 copies. According to Sachin Bansal, Co-Founder and CEO of Flipkart, the company did well because its main focus was to meet consumer expectations.

Flipkart, which was started in 2007 with initial costs of $9,000 and 50,000 titles, made over $4 million in revenue last year. Earlier this year, it raised $8-10 million from New York-based venture capital fund Tiger Global Management.

Flipkart isn't the only player in India's online bookstore arena who is hopeful in this regard. Infibeam, a Gujarat-based online book retailer, has also recorded $20 million revenue target for the year. The list also includes Firstandsecond, Librarywala and Tradusbooks among others who are hopeful of getting a foothold in the market.

Full report here Silicon India

A winning chapter

Entrepreneurs Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal have a bestseller on their hands with their online book store, says Aarti Dua

It’s been described as one of the country’s hottest start-ups, and even called India’s Amazon. Indeed, if you’ve searched for any India-related book online, chances are that you’ve already been given cyber- directions to Flipkart.com. For, in just over two years since it launched online, Flipkart has emerged as one of India’s leading online booksellers.

Undoubtedly, IIT-Delhi classmates and Flipkart’s co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal — they aren’t related — couldn’t have written a better preface. And they’re confident they’ve got a bestseller on their hands. Flipkart has already grabbed market share from e-commerce veterans like rediff.com in the books category, and even edged out early Amazon wannabes like firstandsecond.com.

This is only the opening chapter. The founders recently raised funding from Accel India, the Indian arm of Accel Ventures, which has funded start-ups like Facebook. Now they’re busy scaling up. They plan to expand their booklist, open more distribution centres and, yes, go beyond books to become a full e-commerce play too.

Full report here Telegraph

Startups turning a new page, online

Reading is still alive and kicking but the way people buy books is changing for sure. Like most other things, people want to buy their books too, but online. Some enterprising entrepreneurs have spotted this opportunity and are bridging the gap, setting up online book stores and discussion forums, connecting discerning readers.

So now we have librarywala.com, weRead, Flipkart, Shelfari and Indiaplaza, all selling books online or offering a forum to discuss and compare books.

After working for a few years with Amazon, Sachin Bansal started Flipkart.com, an online bookstore which is doing brisk sales. He aims to reach Rs 25 crore in sales by March this year in just over a year of operations. “The main reason is that it is easier to start online, and you can start it from anywhere,” says Bansal. It was a similar story with weRead, called iRead before being bought by Lulu.com.

Full report here Economic Times

Flipkart showcases services at WBF

Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd., a new online book selling portal, showcased its portal and its unique selling prepositions to the book lovers at the World Book Fair.

Flipkart.com with more than 6 million titles available on its portal not only makes a wide variety of books accessible but also provides fast and efficient services to its customers. In order to become the largest e-commerce website in India in coming years, the company gives a world class online buying experience to its customers, which reflects in the experiences shared by customers on different platforms and the increasing popularity.

Commenting on the occasion, Binny Bansal, Co-founder of Flipkart.com said, "This platform attracts book lovers from all over India which gives us a great opportunity to showcase our portal and talk about our most admired services. In the age of internet, where people prefer to shop online, book lovers are also shifting to the online platforms to buy books which not only make them accessible to the wide variety of books at a click but also make the purchase less cumbersome. The online book buying space is growing at about 20-30% per month in India and we are the leading website in the online book buying space with more than 6 million visitors every month. With more focused and planned approach Flipkart.com has already captured two-third market share in India. The company plans to penetrate the market further over the next fiscal and plans to launch its "Cash on Delivery" service by March 2010 and expand the titles available at the portal to over 10 million by the year end."

He added, "With a mission to become the largest e-commerce website in India and a vision to provide Indians the best online shopping experience, Flipkart.com today with a workforce strength of about 200 employees has been able to capture a major share in the online selling world just with its books that many other players with various product offerings have not yet been able to capture. The company registered a total sale of Rs. 40 million in 2008-09 and projects a sale of Rs. 250-300 million by this fiscal end with a growth rate of about 25% per month."

Flipkart.com boasts of a leisurely browsing experience which is simple, convenient and customer friendly yet offers quality services like safe and fast payment facilities and the quickest delivery service in the country by any web portal.