RUCHI MEHRA HAS rediscovered the charm of brown boxes all over again. Courtesy, fashionandyou.com an online shopping website that brought a whole new world of retail therapy to her fingertips. Now, along with her mandatory login sites, like mail and news websites, she logs in to her favourite shopping sites and keeps an eye out for discount deals and auctions. According to her, “In recent months, several boxes of goodies were delivered to my office and home every few days. I don’t mind that I receive them after a week or so, it just adds to the thrill of shopping. And the deals online are just getting better.”

Even as Orkut, Facebook and Twitter users grow by the second, another interesting trend that is finally emerging in India is that of online shopping. We are finally succumbing to the pleasures and comfort of online shopping. The image of the money-haggling Indians who love wrangling bargains and will negotiate for hours, is being revamped. Technology savvy youngsters, who now prefer to find even their soul mates online, have given rise to a number of portals that are slowly entering the Indian retail domain and starting to flourish.

VIRTUAL MERCHANTS
As Google, one the world’s largest and fastest search engines turned into a bubbly teenager recently, India achieved the magical 100 million Internet users milestone. A study that confirmed this also suggested that Indians are likely to increase that number three-fold by 2014. Clearly, the global village theory which was a ludicrous fantasy at one time is a case of stark reality staring point-blank at us right now.

“India is a nascent country as far as e-commerce goes. However, with technology maturing and portals that offer different business categories (food, apparels, banking, etc) setting shop online, the Indian consumer has begun to get comfortable with the ‘click to buy’ trend. The total volume of the Indian online industry might be small but it has reached a critical mass that is enough to sustain and fuel billion dollar businesses from each business category. And it’s not just metro cities that are in tune with this global trend,” says Manu Agarwal, founder and CEO, Naaptol.com, one of the leading online shopping portals in India. Mukesh Bansal (36), CEO, of Myntra.com, one of the top three e-commerce sites in India concurs, “We started the personalisation business but then realised that there was a huge retail market in India and no one else was tapping it. So we moved into fashion and lifestyle retailing and have only grown since.”

Shailen Amin, CEO and co-founder of BeStylish.com, an online retailer for shoes, who did his BA from Rutgers University in New Jersey in Accounting and a CPA from the USA, also agrees that the boom in the Indian markets combined with the fact that footwear was seen as a large opportunity for investors was an important reason for his starting the portal.

For a start-up of such magnitude, sheer hard work isn’t always enough. A decent amount of entrepreneurship and tech-savvy is also required. Shailen says, “I remember the morning the website was to go live, the whole team worked through the night, no one slept! It was a mixture of accomplishment, nerves and pure joy. It is not easy, but then the satisfaction of creating a brand makes it very much worth the effort.”

However, 25-year-old Aditi Talreja of Deliverychef.in, an online portal customises and satiates your hunger needs as per that convenience and location, points out to another diverse motive behind her start-up – her foreign education and exposure. “Ordering online is a very popular concept abroad and I really missed it. I noticed that here too, people tend to order in a lot so I thought that it would be convenient for them if they could find a list of all the places that delivered to them online on Deliverychef.in, see all their options, the menu and simply click to order,” she beams, adding that once the website started doing well, they expanded into cakes, cupcakes, gourmet foods and even mithai.

SETTING UP SHOP
The challenges especially in a country, still undergoing massive infrastructure changes, like India, are many. While for Mukesh at Myntra.com, “Getting funding and good people on board was the toughest part.” Aditi agrees, “It was a new concept, not many restauranteurs could imagine how it would generate much business for them, especially some of the non-tech savvy restaurants. However, now that we’re up and running, they see the value addition to the business through their website and it has become much easier. Moreover, setting up the infrastructure to accept and transmit orders instantaneously and mapping the delivery areas took a while to figure out, so we tried our best to minimise ordering time so that the food gets to you as soon as possible.”

“The biggest test is ensuring product fidelity. What you see wonline and what you receive at the end of the day should be same. Naaptol has invested hugely in getting the user interface right to improve the scalability of its business,” says 40-year-old Manu Agarwal.

But the scenario is not all glum. 29-year-old Kunal Bahl, co-founder and CEO of Snapdeal.com, one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in India with over 500, 000 visitors every day explains, “There is a lot of willingness now, from both the customers and the retailers to use online platforms as a significant channel for buying and selling goods and services. And given the explosion of internet users, the sector will certainly see phenomenal growth.” Interestingly, Snapdeal.com which currently has 70 per cent market share in its industry was ranked in the top 50 sites of India in a short span of just 10 months, ahead of leading online platforms that were around for many years. “Going by that rate, the percentage of Internet users who will take to e-commerce and online buying of goods and services will rise steadily,” Bahl adds.

Take for example Rajat Kevra, a social media analyst who logged into a site called Strapsandstrings.com, a website that specialises in lingerie sales and bought his girlfriend lingerie, “I could never gather the courage to enter a lingerie store and buy her anything because I found it embarrassing. But buying online is a breeze and without the hassle and looks that I might draw while browsing in the woman’s section.”

Users are flocking online for reasons like Rajat’s and much more. In small towns, the percentage of shoppers is much higher for the simple reason that products like these are not accessible to them locally. “We are targeting people from tier I cities beyond metros in tier II and tier III cities due to lack of physical availability of products in these areas. Naaptol works on the convenience factor and makes these products readily available to them, which adds great value to the whole process,” clarifies Manu.

BEHIND THE CLICK
But even with the growing number of internet users, Aditi explains, “Setting up an Internet business in India is not very easy; building and developing the right back-end, which is easy to use and update by a large user-base, not all of whom are tech savvy, is a challenge. We spent a long time building and developing the software, to make sure things were easy to use and user-friendly. Moreover, execution offline needed to be seamless.” Managing the data is also most of the times a herculean task, but working smart is the clear mantra of these bright entrepreneurs. While Shailen uses “Smart and energetic young talent from some of the best universities in India” to make sense of the massive amounts of data, Aditi confesses that, “I’m involved in designing the functionality of the website but a strong back-end control panel ensures that things are looked after in the right manner.”

And while all work, no play seems to be the case here, yet an interesting facet of the whole technology revolution is the fact that anybody and everybody with a passion for something can turn it into a commerce opportunity. Aditi who is a complete foodie agrees, “Food is serious business for me now. I love checking out new restaurants and cafes in my free time – trying different kinds of food and knowing when a new place has opened up.”

But whatever said, convenience is the biggest USP of these portals. As in the case of BeStylish.com which is an online retailer with the largest offering of international, high street and regular footwear brands. Regular updating is the name of the game as 36-year-old Shailen says, “There has to be fresh changes every few days, and new stock has to be updated all the time.”

“Naaptol boasts of a strong virtual-commerce parentage, given their technology-laden atmosphere and complete IPR ownership. Well networked call centers and powerful logistics services, combined with robust technology makes us a force to be reckoned with,” says Manu.

Mukesh seems most convinced about the big bang success theory of the virtual world in India. He adds, “More new brands and categories are added to the website everyday. Focus on brand is in a big way. The e-commerce industry growth will be close to 47 per cent in 2010-11 and will scale rapidly. Fashion and retail brands are accepting e-commerce as a serious sales channel. We are right now at a stage that US was in e-commerce 10 years ago and thus can foresee the online revolution in our country.”

“It is the perfect time to be in the online retail industry,” concludes Aditi, the youngest amongst them all. Well, we couldn’t have said it better!