Flipkart.Com - the Success Saga
Things are easier said than Done! To realize our dreams and that also in such a grand manner is really a tough task. The founders of Flipkart have probably conquered their dreams with the amazing success of Flipkart. Flipkart is something which has really opened up the Indian e-commerce market and that also in a big way.
Flipkart was co-founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in Oct 2007. Both are graduates from IIT-Delhi and have prior work experience in Amazon.com They both were solid coders and wanted to open a portal that compared different e-commerce websites, but there were hardly any such sites in India and they decided to give birth to their own e-commerce venture - Flipkart.com
Thus was born Flipkart in Oct 2007 with an initial investment of 4 lac (co-founders savings). It was never going to be easy since India has had bad past experiences with e-commerce trading. It was not an easy segment to break into, people were very particular in paying money for something which they had not seen and received. The trust was missing in the Indian customers. So what Flipkart had to do was to instill trust and faith in their customers. And they did exactly the same, will discuss more on how they did so later in the post.
Flipkart began with selling books, since books are easy to procure, target market which reads books is in abundance, books provide more margin, are easy to pack and deliver, do not get damaged in transit and most importantly books are not very expensive, so the amount of money a customer has to spend to try out one's service for one time is very minimal. Flipkart sold only books for the first two years. Flipkart started with the consignment model (procurement based on demand) i.e. they had ties with 2 distributors in Bangalore, whenever a customer ordered a book, they used to personally procure the book from the dealer, pack the book in their office and then courier the same. In the initial months the founder's personal cell numbers used to
Flipkart was co-founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in Oct 2007. Both are graduates from IIT-Delhi and have prior work experience in Amazon.com They both were solid coders and wanted to open a portal that compared different e-commerce websites, but there were hardly any such sites in India and they decided to give birth to their own e-commerce venture - Flipkart.com
Thus was born Flipkart in Oct 2007 with an initial investment of 4 lac (co-founders savings). It was never going to be easy since India has had bad past experiences with e-commerce trading. It was not an easy segment to break into, people were very particular in paying money for something which they had not seen and received. The trust was missing in the Indian customers. So what Flipkart had to do was to instill trust and faith in their customers. And they did exactly the same, will discuss more on how they did so later in the post.
Flipkart began with selling books, since books are easy to procure, target market which reads books is in abundance, books provide more margin, are easy to pack and deliver, do not get damaged in transit and most importantly books are not very expensive, so the amount of money a customer has to spend to try out one's service for one time is very minimal. Flipkart sold only books for the first two years. Flipkart started with the consignment model (procurement based on demand) i.e. they had ties with 2 distributors in Bangalore, whenever a customer ordered a book, they used to personally procure the book from the dealer, pack the book in their office and then courier the same. In the initial months the founder's personal cell numbers used to