"DesiDime is different from the e-commerce websites"

Dataquest tried to know from Mehul Jobanputra-CEO and Cofounder of DesiDime.com the purpose behind his startup and what it means for customers. Here are excerpts:

Q. What's your opinion regarding India's e-commerce landscape?
India is currently ranked third when it comes to the number of internet users. This has happened when the internet penetration is still very low in India. With the growth in the number of internet users India's e-commerce industry will also see tremendous growth.

Thus India's commerce landscape is going to see a significant growth story in next couple of years.

Q. What kind of challenges do you see in India's e-commerce market?
The biggest challenges which we see in India e-commerce market are profitability and building infrastructure in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

Q. Where does Desidime.com fit in in India's e-commerce landscape?
DesiDime.com is an online shopping community that acts as a bridge between buyers and sellers and provides deals, coupons and a forum to interact on one platform.

We are not an e-commerce player but this is an industry which is running parallel along with the e-commerce industry . The shopper does not purchase anything on our website. What we do is to serve as a platform where users can discover deals and coupons for various e-commerce portals on one site

Q. What's your revenue model? How does it uniquely place you in the market?
Our revenue model is simple. Whenever a shopper makes a purchase from any e-commerce portal after clicking on the deal or coupon listed on our site, we get a certain commission on that sale.

The biggest strength of our platform is that we are completely a user driven platform. For example Deals listed on the home page is listed after it is approved by the users who are part of our community

Q. What kind of growth do you witness for Desidime.com?
We have witnessed a tremendous growth in the last three years. Our subscribed user base has grown to 1.75 lakh people. And the online forum has around 1.4 million post making us India's leading online shopping community.

Q. Have you received funding from for this? If yes or no, why?
No we have not received any funding. We have been bootstrapped for the last three years. Since we were profitable from the beginning we never felt the need to raise funding.

Q. What is your opinion in FDI in e-commerce? Does it threaten the interests of Indian e-commerce players?

Indian e-commerce players have got a head-start over foreign players of 4-5 years so it wont affect their interest.FDI should open up with certain caveats, one foreign players should pump money in backend infrastructure and second they should purchase a part of their inventory from local suppliers.

Overall FDI in ecommerce should improve the efficiency in the system.