E-tailers in NCR start with a bang!

Unlike India's own Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, the National Capital Region (NCR) consisting of Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida, will have to strive to get that ‘hub' status.

However, the enterprising Dilliwallah spirit for doing business seems lively as a number of e-commerce/online start-ups are mushrooming in the NCR.

Some of these are already performing well and are earning name and fame, while the others are carving out their identities online.
Dataquest tries to get an inside story of these budding enterprises...

LocalCircles.com:

 

Sachin Taparia
CMD and co-founder, LocalCircles.com

 

 

This is high on social quotient having launched its portal by the chief minister of Delhi, Shiela Dikshit, as recently as in March 2013. Headquartered in Noida, it is headed by CMD and co-founder Sachin Taparia, a social entrepreneur who earlier ran a subsidiary firm of Boeing, Mukesh Jain, CEO who quit Juniper Networks in Silicon Valley and its current CTO.

What does the trick for it, is its innovative idea of bringing interest-based communities online in Delhi together for sourcing credible, organized information.

As Taparia says, "Essentially we have integrated online social communities with commerce."

For example, it could be a circle or community of paediatricians, or the neighborhood, or school, and all the members are pulled in together only through invites.

Thus it is based on real, living identities, and the trust-building happens through ratings that each of the enlisted people give or receive.

The portal has received a personal funding from N Godrej and is now looking for over $2 mn invesment.

"Ten-fifteen deep interest based circles are there right now which are likely to increase to 50-60 circles along with schools, neighborhood based ones-these are the trusted gateways coming on the platform," adds Taparia.

LocalCircles now has added 2,000+ trusted local Delhi/NCR businesses, covering 95% of daily needs, and is rated independently and by local communities (neighbors, colleagues, co-parents/teachers, local family/friends). It claims to be the world's first local network to make citizens' daily life safer and easier.

Zaakpay.com:

 

Upasana Taku
CEO and co-founder, Zaakpay.com

 

 

With a rich experience in the online platform and having worked in the US, Israel, and other countries in Europe, Upasana Taku ventured into the online payment space in India in September 2010 with Zaakpay.com.

While helping her friend Bipin at Mobikwik, Taku came to know how payments work in India and found that "payments in India are 10 years behind than how they work across the rest of the world in terms of electronic payments."

"Bipen (the other co-founder of Zaakpay.com) and I together formed Zaakpay and created various payment products. Our first product went live in April last year and last April-December we did about `100 crore of business," reveals Taku.

Zaakpay, based out of Delhi, now has 175 merchants using its payment gateway and every month, it does transactions worth `10 crore or more. In June 2012 it received funding from Sequioa Capital.

"We have everything online-product/pricing, technical integration-so that you can test the solution and then sign up. This whole process takes 1-2 days. We are the only payment company that has been able to convince our partner's bank to accept online applications. So in our case the time-to-market for the merchant is 3 days to a maximum of 12 days. We are also the only company in India to have created an in-app solution," she says.

"When you have an app on your phone like that of a Flipkart or an eBay, there is only a cash-on-delivery option for payment. This is because no Indian company had created a solution that works. So we created a solution last year, Mpay, which is now in production stage.We have done about `10 crore just on the android platform. So now we are marketing that strongly, we have tested it thoroughly and are seeing merchants using it for high-value transactions through mobile apps; so now we want to take this forward," Taku adds.

 

OfficeYes.com:

 

Siddharth Nambiar
co-founder and MD, OfficeYes.com

 

What is unique about this start-up is that it caters to the B2B e-commerce requirements of offices in terms of office technology, office stationery, corporate gifting, etc.

Set up in April-May 2012 by Siddharth Nambiar and Arvind Sivdas, the co-founders and managing directors, in Delhi-Gurgaon, OfficeYes.com has grown to a 120+ person company, catering to about 5,000 SMBs and over 500 corporate clients, including GE, Google, HCL, Shell, Dupont, MicroSoft, GE, etc.

For OfficeYes, being at the right time at the right place too has played its part, as Indian businesses buying online is beginning to be seen as something of a trend.

As Nambiar says, "B2B e-commerce is not well known in India. With respect to our market size, our average owner (client) size is 10 times that of Flipkart because of our B2B model. An office buys expensive things in bulk. It buys printers, pens, smartphones; secondly, industry competition is very less; in our case vis-a-vis B2C sites, we set up microsites for example, for GE, which does procurement for its offices, we keep updating the microsites and the supplies get delivered from our warehouse to any of its offices. This is a very disruptive and sticky technology that we have developed and our customers keep coming back to us."

Banking heavily on technology, Nambiar is quite positive about their performance too, "As a business we are currently at $3-4 mn revenues and will be doing $10 mn annualized revenue by the end of this year. We are already clocking positive operating margin."