Top 10 E-Commerce Websites

BY:ARHAM PARTAP JAIN

LIST of Website according to their popularity

Flipkart.com
Founded by Sachin Bansal & Binny Bansal in 2007 Both were IIT , Delhi alumni and had worked in Amazon.com

Acquisitions
2010: We Read , a social book discovery tool 2011: Mime360, a digital content platform company 2011: Chakpak.com is a Bollywood news site that offers updates, news, photos and videos 2012: Letsbuy.com is India's second largest e-retailer in electronics

Features
Simple online buying experience Optimized and real fast delivery for a huge majority of shipments Cash on delivery and card on delivery Detailed regular updates and tracking of shipments Simple buying experience using wallet Selling DRM ( Digital Rights Management) free legal music

 Warehouse processes that combine automation with people effort for faster processing while minimizing cost to the customers

Technological Innovation
Use of Linux HA instead of expensive hardware LBS Continuous deployment process Home grown supply chain technologies that enable process innovation and the super fast delivery Proprietary Inventory prediction and planning technology leading to very high percentage of orders being shipped

Future Innovations
Will work on mobile Will put more focus on the customer experience Improve supply chain technology

99labels.com
99labels is an online event-based flash sales, membersonly portal where members can buy a wide selection of Indian and international brands at deep discounts. The portal offers members a host of international brands which are often not available in India at up to 90% off. The limited time event brings a sense of urgency to the sale, and members can log into and look forward to a clutch of new and exciting sales every day. It offers a discrete environment, wherein it can help liquidate their excess stocks in a quick and easy way, amongst a discerning audience.

Recent Associations
They have, in the two years of their existence, been able to bring up names like Ed Hardy, Loccitaine, Diesel, Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci and many more big names

Significance of 99
The number 99 has an interesting personality because it represents both a never-ending array of labels and sales as well as a sense of a discount, being one less than a hundred. In the world of retail, 99 as a number has a deeply positive psychological effect on consumers and has been shown across the globe as a number which spurs the decision making process where purchases are concerned.

Features
Their USP is international premium brands at upto 90% discount. Launching 9 new brands daily which are available for 3 days only and only members can shop, creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency that add to it Club99 is a unique loyalty club program where customers are given special perquisites and benefits like free shipping, early access to sales as well as being given preferred treatment like customized sales and promotions .

Future Plans
99labels currently has 5 offices across the globe and will be coming up with more offices soon To associate with more international brands that are not available in India and providing the same to their member base at deep discounts. They have plans to speed up their delivery, they have started express delivery on select merchandise, where they deliver in 7 days time . They will make customer service more prompt, and generally improve all facets of the customer experience to make it unmatched in all respects.

Snapdeal.com
The portal sells discount coupons in over 50 cities in the country and has partnerships with over 10,000 merchants

History
In early 2008, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, the founders of Snapdeal (then called Jasper) wanted to sell discount coupons to Indian consumers They believed, would help retailers get rid of perishable inventory. However, their business model was vastly different from what it is today. In the early phase, the founders werent convinced about the Internet as a distribution medium, they were skeptical about people would pay online, download these coupons, print it and then take it to a retailer.

The company had undergone through a variety of business models, distribution strategies and its managements ability to make extremely quick business decisions.

Plan A :-The early experiment

Believed discount couponing will certainly work for both consumers and merchants Snapdeals Plan A was to create a whole new category and the company launched their first product MoneySaver, a printed book of tear able coupons from multiple brands (with a particular validity per coupon). The coupon book was sold to consumers for Rs. 400. Plan A failed as the company realized that the discount coupons got expired in a stipulated time and Snapdeal still had those printed books, with expired coupons, lying around in its office. Then they moved to mobile coupons but with mobile coupons, there was no inventory.

Plan B:-Fixing the inventory issue

Snapdeal tweaked its model to deliver these coupons onto a mobile phone For Rs. 99 per month, it would deliver an unlimited number of discount coupons. In order to buy this service, consumers had to buy a scratch card (with a unique code) for Rs. 99, send out an SMS to Snapdeal with the code, register ones phone and then start receiving the coupons The first month was a free trial; over 1,00,000 consumers signed up But lately Plan B failed too because no one wanted to do efforts for buying the scratch card

Plan C:-A model that works

They opted for the middle path and launched a discount card called MoneySaver Prime It looked like a credit card and consumers were willing to buy it The challenge was there were no retailers who sold a product like this Started off with selling these discount cards at Caf Coffee Day outlets This could not be scaled either since the touch points with consumers were too far and wide.

 Modified the concept again and made it a B2B2C (business to business to consumer) product. Corporate customers could use the discount card to hand out incentives to employees and customers. The cards were co-branded with a client company. This approach moved in the right direction. Profit margins were good and the company sold a few lakh discounts cards every month. Most importantly, in this phase, the company built good relationships with several merchants and brand owners.

Plan D:- Just an experiment which is extremely successful

In January 2010, one of its merchant-partners mentioned to Bahl about how he acquired seven new customers by selling a discount coupon online. The merchant suggested that Bahl should explore something similar On February 4th 2010, with the help of just one designer and one developer, the duo launched Snapdeal.in (.com wasnt available then) After 20 months of launching online, the company employs over 500 people (its strength was less than 50 people while working on Plan C). The company raised over $ 52 million in venture capital financing and is working towards launching Snapdeal in over 100 cities in India. From selling discount deals for retail services, it has now expanded to sell deals for online products and travel deals as well

Future plans
To grab the entire share of a consumers wallet by expanding the business.

Jabong.com
Jabong is from the Rocket internet group. Its a German investment firm that starts companies all over the world. Unlike the typical startups, Jabong was an e-commerce initiative from Rocket internet group itself. There are no founders in the traditional sense - ie., there had been nobody who worked for sweat equity to build a proof of market opportunity and ramped up the business from there. Since it was founded by an investment firm, they had huge investments from day1, and Rocket group had assembled(employed) a team of good e-commerce executives

Features
Active community Easy to navigate Good content Good deals Site is fast and responsive

Yebhi.com
Offline or physical retail was undergoing a struggle a couple of years back because of supply chain issues. They were unable to reach out to a large section of the market, because there was lack of streamlining in the delivery process. This prompted Manmohan Agarwal to look at e-commerce who was first the CEO of Bigshoebazaar India Pvt Ltd

Business Model
Manmohan noticed that most of the players present in the market were focused on hardline products like consumer electronics, mobiles, etc. Hence, he decided to focus on softline products like apparel, footwear, etc. This is how Yebhi.com was born in 2009. An inventory model based company which have a half million square foot warehouse in Gurgaon.

Features
The quality of customer service is a primary concern . A streamlined workflow in place, which ensures that the time between a customer placing an order and the product being shipped from their end is not more than 1-2 hours. They call this as click to ship time, and take pride in the speed and efficiency.

 Customer care unit is functional 247. They deliver to about 11,000 pin codes in India, including Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Yebhi.com already has 14 delivery hubs in India

 Yebhi.com works on the inventory model, An interesting statistic that we got to know about Yebhi.com is that 40% of the consumers visiting the site are women
From the outset, Yebhi.com has been a capital/cash efficient company. It have attracted two rounds of funding so far. In 2010, it has raised a Series A round of funding from Nexus Venture Partners , followed it up with a Series B in 2011 from Catamaran Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners

Future plans
Yebhi will soon expand to 24 delivery hubs in India Will focus on becoming the largest player in softline products.

Myntra.com

BUSINESS MODEL
Myntra.com is an aggregator of many brands. Its business model is based on procuring current season merchandise from various brands and making them available on the portal at the same time as in respective retail brand outlets. All these products are offered to customers on MRP

 Myntra launched a brand campaign with its first TVC in July 2011. The commercial 'juxtaposes new-age fashion with old-world grit' and positions Myntra as a 'fashionable new age' brand. Myntra's second campaign, with the tagline "Ramp It Up", was launched in October 2011 with a TVC. The new ad scored high on fashion quotient and the core message was to communicate the launch of the Autumn Winter 2011 collection on Myntra.com. In February 2012, Myntra also rolled out an OOH (out of home) campaign across Tier 2 cities, to build brand awareness and promote online shopping.

Funding
In October 2007, Myntra received a seed funding from Accel Partners (formerly Erasmic Venture Fund), Sasha Mirchandani from Mumbai Angels and another angel investor. In November 2008, Myntra raised with its A funding of $5 million from NEA-Indo US Ventures, IDG Ventures and Accel Partners. In the second round of funding led by Tiger Global and participated by existing investors IDG Ventures and Indo-US Venture Partners, Myntra raised $14 million. Towards the end of 2011, Myntra.com raised $20 million in its third round of funding led by Tiger Global.

 It has started as an online destination for personalized products back in 2007, has expanded into broader lifestyle and fashion retailing. Today, Myntra is the largest online lifestyle retailer with over 200 national and international brands under its banner Myntra has brought in a new level of professionalism and technology enablement to the e-commerce space in India. The company's unique offerings include the largest inseason product catalogue, 100% authentic products, cash on delivery, and 30 day return policy, making Myntra the preferred online shopping destination in the country

Features
It translates a superior experience with customers Broader product selection unmatched efficiency which leads to a better purchasing decision. Easy to navigate Good content Fast and responsive

Naaptol.com
Naaptol.com is Indias leading comparison based social shopping portal Be it consumer electronic goods, laptops, mobiles, cameras, LCD TVs, or home appliances, Naaptol have all the latest deals At lowest prices available in the market Product of our choice can be chosen from the extensive product reviews and ratings from experts, Comparison it with others can be done Feedback and purchase is done at the best available price. This serves the buyers who wish to practically see the product before they buy.

 Naaptol initiates selling. Normally before making a buying decision of an expensive product the consumer does an in depth research on the product from various websites which in this fast moving world is an extremely tedious task. He would often wish a single website that would meet all his buying needs. Fulfilling his desire is Naaptol with its shopping encyclopedia

Business Model
Advertisements on Naaptol Offline Lead Revenues Online selling partnership Micro sites for Sellers

Naaptol makes money by charging sellers for the leads it generates for them. Also it charges brands from advertising on the site.

Features
Naaptol is essentially a comparison based social shopping portal It gives products complete with their specifications and reviews to help users make informed decisions. It helps both sellers and buyers together Naaptol provides complete contact details of every seller registered on the website. This helps both sellers and buyers as sellers get visibility in the Internet and a chance to expand their business too. On the other hand buyers are satisfied because they can choose the best deal for themselves. There is location based search too. If a user wishes to choose a retail outlet near his place of convenience he can easily navigate to it on the website through location filters.

 user friendly It has all important filters to help any customer narrow down to his choice of product consuming least amount of time. The filters include Brand, Price, and Technical filters for each product. Even the smallest data is put under a common broad title so that every user gets complete information and does not have to hunt for anything.

Future plans
The company is planning to venture into some new categories like finance, books, travel and many more. They are going on an aggressive spree to help sellers sell. Be it direct RO, website promotions or other alternate mediums we are going to try out everything. They aim to do at least 5 crores of revenue in the next financial year. They have started with their own call centre now. It has begun work in full swing with 30 seats as of now and but they will grow to 100 seats by the end of this year.

Fashionandyou.com
Fashion and You India is part of a global brand alliance and has completed its first round of funding from well known European and Indian private investors. With this funding and global know-how of the brand alliance operating in Brazil, Russia and Switzerland. Fashion and You plans to become a significant sales channel for high fashion brands contributing to atleast 10% of their sales in India by 2011. Harish Bahl is the Indian Investor, Founder and Chairman of Fashion and You and he brings with him 15 years of successful entrepreneurship. Harish is the founder CEO of Smile Interactive Technologies Group and has incubated and grown several successful leading online businesses like Quasar (WPP Digital & Smile JV) , Tyroo (Smile & Yahoo Join venture) , Zoomtra and Zumtra. Pearl Uppal is Co-founder and CEO . In her last assignment as Director Sales for Yahoo! India, Pearl was heading monetization for the company and was a key architect in charting 30X revenue growth for Yahoo! Pearl has worked with leading Indian portal Rediff.com and General Electric. She is considered one of the thought leaders in the Indian Digital Industry and is a regular speaker at consumer Internet forums

Business Model
The uniqueness of this business model is that it provides an alternate channel for retail without its baggage It solves the underlying problem preventing the growth of ecommerce in India both for the buyer & the seller . Indian consumers have always perceived Internet as a platform to deliver great deals, and luxury & premium brands have long been waiting for alternate sales channels, which would extend sales, reach without diluting their brand. This business model addresses both these needs very well. The success of similar businesses in other markets, the wealth of diversified experience of our operating management team and the benefits from our global brand alliance, gives Fashion and You the competitive advantage to be a market leader in the retail commerce space in India.

Features
It is for the truly stylish and the aspiring fashion connoisseur Branded products Customer friendly Easy to navigate

Future plans
To redefine how fashion and design goods are marketed and distributed in India. Their business vision and plan is to be an undisputed leader in fashion and luxury retail and a leading ecommerce player in India over the next 2 to 3 years

Infibeam.com
Infibeam.com is an electronic commerce company headquartered in Ahmedabad. It is an online retailer for books, electronics, and automobiles in India. In 2008, Infibeam created a student support site known as presentsir.com. Later, they acquired Picsquare.com, a photo printing website based in Bangalore. In August 2010, Infibeam.com launched www.infibeam.us for US consumers Infibeam also launched an EBook reader, Infibeam Pi, its successor Pi2, and a media device, Infibeam Phi.

 Infibeam also provides an e-commerce platform to retailers like NDTVshopping, HiDesign, etc. In 2011, Infibeam launched Buildabazaar, an online ecommerce platform which allows users to create their own web store Infibeam Pi is an eBook Reader launched by Infibeam.com. Further they launched touch screen pi 2 which is wifi enabled Android tablet called Phi was released afterwards.

Thank You