Flipping the face of Indian shopping

Sachin Bansal is an internet entrepreneur, who has helped redefine shopping for millions of Indians. Co-founder and CEO of the homegrown online shopping phenomenon, Flipkart, this IIT Delhi alumnus has come a long way from his formative years in Chandigarh. Along with business partner Binny Bansal, today he leads a business with gross revenues of more than US$1 billion. A gaming enthusiast, who would have been a professional gamer as an alternative career option, Sachin Bansal loves spending free time with his family.

Sachin heads customer facing activities at Flipkart right from technology to marketing. He also looks after the corporate divisions. But when Sachin and Binny left Amazon to start their own venture, they were simply looking at making shopping an easier experience for Indians. Little did they know that they would soon be riding the wave of untapped e-commerce potential and end up as poster boys of Indian e-tailing. With an initial startup capital of Rs. 4 lakh, Flipkart took off by selling books and then moved on to other offerings like consumer durables and apparel, and today boasts of its own logistics firm with in-house technology to support its operations. It is this strong supply chain backbone among other things, that has Flipkart being valued at nearly Rs. 10,000 crore.

Starting up

After graduating from IIT Delhi in 2005, Sachin worked with Techspan in Bangalore. On moving to Amazon, he met Binny Bansal, whom he had earlier got to know at IIT. Amazon was then building Amazon Web Services, which was powering start-ups in the United States.

It was then that they decided to give up the comfort of regular employment and kickstart their own online venture. The risk started to pay off when they leveraged their insight into the psyche of the Indian customer. Starting Flipkart completely from scratch, they soon realised the whole shopping behaviour and infrastructure challenges in the Indian market were different from those in the US and European markets. Rethinking strategies and creating customised solutions for India meant they had to keep their thinking fresh. The cash-on-delivery mode of payment is one such innovation popularised by Flipkart that is now commonplace among online retailers in India.

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Drawing parallels

Sachin feels Flipkart cannot be compared to an international player like Amazon as the dynamics in India are different. But drawing parallels with Chinese online companies would seem more relevant. Learnings and inspiration can be drawn from Chinese companies such as Alibaba, 360Buy and Baidu. India is probably at a stage today where the Chinese were eight years ago, from an e-commerce and consumer behaviour point of view.

Passion in action

Flipkart’s ‘Big Billion Day’ sale in October was a first-of-its-kind shopping experience for Indian customers. Sales of about $100 million were achieved within 10 hours. Though there were some issues due to the amount of online traffic and also with wrong listing of product prices, Sachin Bansal regards it as an experiment that made history and turned out to be very successful.

Though e-commerce in India is still growing and only around 10% of the people shop online, the passion with which a leader like Sachin Bansal has charted the course of Flipkart and Indian online retail in general, is there for all to see. Ask him about plans to sell off his company and that passion comes through in the reply. ‘No never. I will never sell Flipkart’.