Shop online while at your home was turned into a possibility by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal when they created Flipkart in October 2007. There are perhaps a rare number of people in our country who know less or nothing about Flipkart. Read on to derive your inspiration from the success story of India’s leading online retailer Flipkart.
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal were the two classmates and alumni of IIT [ Indian Institute of Technology] of Delhi who founded Flipkart to make online shopping accessible to all sections of people in India at Kormangala locality of Bangalore city in the October month of 2007.
The idea of Flipkart popped up in their minds one day when they used to work with the world’s first and largest eCommerce company Amazon. Sachin asked Binny during a casual talk in the Amazon cafeteria why can’t we create our own Amazon-like platform back in India. Both agreed to experiment with their idea in our country and it was October 2007 when they created Flipkart in Bangalore.
Sachin Bansal reveals in one of his interviews that while it was easy to create a website but positioning Flipkart in the minds of our own people was a tough affair because that was a time when there was a little trust in online shopping among Indians.
Knowing the ground fact that Indians are extremely afraid of using their debit and credit cards for shopping online, both in no time realized that a smart strategy to make online shopping work in India is to use COD{ cash on delivery} model for payment collections and fortunately it worked for them.
The duo create a shortlist of products and narrowed it down to books because it was something easy to handle from pickup to delivery. Sachin says one of my friends back in Mumbai had ordered a book on our website.
The unfortunate part was that we were able to find his book looking around for almost all bookshops in Bangalore. We would return empty-handed in the evening but as fate favors the hope, we managed to procure it from a bookstore that hadn’t come in our notice. We all felt happy and immediately packed it and sent it for delivery to our friend. That was a turning moment in the successful journey of Flipkart as our orders for books began to grow every day.
They continued to procure books from local booksellers and even ensured delivery at the doorsteps of their customers on their own. There is no shame in doing a work that gives you hope to live your dream. That time no one perhaps would have expected that Flipkart could be an eCommerce giant in the future.
The e-retailer continued selling books and it was later in 2008 ( It had then to a great extent dominated the minds of Indian online shoppers ) when Flipkart took the decision of selling other product categories such as clothing, electronics, home appliances etc.
The company’s fast paced growth and increasing popularity among Indian customers in a less time shocked many because a company that in its initial stage hardly used to receive 150 order per day, only after 5 years of time touched record breaking 3 lakh sales per day.