Featured Technology Talk

Flipkart delivers on the dot

                         

Four months ago, Flipkart.com was selling one book every minute on the Internet. Today, it sells four items every minute. The firm's success mantra: employing technology for speedy and accurate delivery to customers.Sachin and Binny Bansal co-founded the e-commerce site in 2007 after resigning from their jobs at Amazon India. With Rs. 4 lakh in seed capital and just the two of them as employees, they were pouncing on a demand-supply gap in online bookselling. The duo initially did everything, from programming, forging supplier relationships and book procurement to logistics, packing and shipping. “It was a minimal start and a case of figuring out things as they came,” Sachin recalls. “We started earning customer goodwill, and what followed was phenomenal word-of-mouth publicity. We became profitable in six months.”In 2007, Flipkart started by offering 50,000 titles. Today, it offers four million. It has 500,000 registered users, and has sold 750,000 books so far. Half the buyers have returned to buy a second book.There are websites that offer better discounts, but Flipkart plans to focus on expanding logistics and adding value. “For now, we are not joining the pricing game. The discounts and free shipping are possible because of our sales volumes, and low expenses on overheads like rent — all of which we are passing on to the customer.” The cash-on-delivery (CoD) scheme for those who hesitate to pay online owing to security fears now brings in 30 per cent of the revenue.Flipkart also continually tweaks its website, for that is where customer satisfaction first meets the technology. A preview of select pages from books will soon be up. Users have been demanding a loyalty scheme, and that too is being worked out. A better search engine, a simpler payment mechanism…the wish list stretches.

When you browse the website, add items to the shopping cart, and confirm your order, you trigger Flipkart's automated communication system. It reads your postal address code and routes the purchase order to one of the company's four warehouses — in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore. If the book is not in stock, the nearest supplier is automatically queried. When the book is available, it is packed and picked up by a courier company within four to 24 hours. The book arrives at your address within one to three days.According to Sachin, the company is “aiming at 24-hour delivery of most books because that's what the customer seeks. In the future, a customer can order a book in the morning and get it by evening.”

REGIONAL MARKET

The company is also busy switching to selling music, movies, mobile phones and game, besides books. Flipkart is also deepening its presence in book selling by targeting the regional language book market, which has largely been untapped. “More books are read in regional languages. It is tough to get book suppliers on board, but once that is in place, this business will further explode,” says Sachin.