Flipkart

By Ishita Sharma

Flipkart is an e-commerce company founded in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. The company is registered in Singapore, but has its headquarters in Bangalore, Karnataka, India.

Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal

Many Indians today are embracing e-retailing with enthusiasm. Popular portals such as Flipkart are spearheading the conversion of offline shoppers into online bargain hunters. For Flipkart, this means the unlocking of a vast audience waiting to experience the joys and comfort of shopping online. Sachin Bansal, CEO and one of the co-founders of Flipkart (the other being Binny Bansal), is an ardent believer in the merits of customer service. “A simple desire to create a tailor-made product for the Indian consumer has grown into something beyond what we imagined,” Sachin muses. A quick glance at Flipkart's timeline shows it was to start as a price comparison platform, but there weren't enough e-commerce sites to compare. So, both the Bansals, who were colleagues at IIT-Delhi, and then at Amazon.com, thought, “why not start an e-commerce site?” That was the genesis of Flipkart. From an initial investment of $8,000, this humble seed of desire has germinated into a $100 million e-retailing favourite. The founders' passion for the consumer Internet space manifests itself in the brand, which is synonymous with customer service and satisfaction. ‘Don't count your customers before they smile' is the company's operating mantra, and it's a mantra they're applying successfully alright!

The concept of e-commerce is downloading at a fairly rapid pace in the psyche of the Indian consumer. In the metros, shortage of time is a big driver for online shopping. On the other hand, accessibility to a variety of products makes audiences from smaller towns and cities opt for the online route. Major retailers face challenges in stocking their stores adequately. Often, customers are unable to purchase items of their choice, thus prompting them to resort to e-retailers.

“We will close 2011-2012 with over $100 million in revenue. By 2015, we want to clock in $1billion, but looking at present trends, we may be able to do it sooner,” states Binny, Flipkart's COO. This statement doesn't seem far-fetched; a quick overview of India's Internet penetration shows a user base of approximately 100 million. The Government's National Broadband Plan, pegged at $4.5 billion, proposes to connect nearly 160 million additional Internet users by 2014. The spread, and subsequent adoption of e-commerce, thus, only seems logical. With several reputed brick-and-mortar retailers also offering online services, it seems natural the trend of shopping remotely will scale up substantially.

Positive word-of-mouth gives Flipkart an edge on the customer side of the business. Backstage, the story's no different. Their recent acquisition of Letsbuy.com will result in a faster expansion rate. Binny's long-term outlook includes scaling up the firm's self-delivery network, and alliancing with like-minded businesses.

Like a typical entrepreneur, Sachin Bansal opines innovation is the key to the company's success. Extending services like cash-on-delivery and credit card payment at doorstep were introduced to provide ample choice and comfort to customers. Now, the attempt is to widen Flipkart's reach in the digital domain through Flyte, the portal's recently launched paid music download service. Customers can buy music in MP3 format from over 700 genres, and 55 languages. The files, which are digital rights management (DRM) free, can be played without any restrictions on any type of device and for an unlimited number of times.


Uncovering India's online avatar is a fascinating process. Only those companies that can successfully engage customers through novel ideas, quality products and seamless services will flourish. May be it is sheer genius, or simple common sense the e-retail hero has been able to accomplish all this during its formative years. Summing up the Flipkart experience, Abhishek Asthana, a marketing student from Pune, has dedicated an ode to the portal. He tweaks the famous MasterCard campaign to sound something like “There are some things you can't buy online… For everything else, there's Flipkart!”