On Shopclues' lower visibility
There's a big difference in what Amazon and Flipkart are trying to do and what we are trying to do. I won't talk about Alibaba yet, because they won't be entering India any time soon. But Flipkart and Amazon are addressing the head categories here. So they're all about selling mobile and smartphones, branded fashion, branded products, etc. Shopclues, on the other hand, is a dark-horse and we've focussed completely on selling unstructured categories like unbranded fashion, refurbished smartphones, smartphones under the price of $80 and home and kitchen. These are fairly larger categories for us.
So, we are different in three ways: focus on small towns, rural areas; sell products in unstructured categories, evolution as a true marketplace, with 500,000 merchants to source products from.
On spotting an opportunity
Our thought was to start an e-com marketplace which is like offline shopping. The only way to reach all Indians is by bringing offline bazaars to the internet.
When we talk about low priced products, the concept of profitability comes to question. We kept the cost of delivering products low by sourcing them locally, within 500 kilometres of where the order was placed.
We are a marketplace. We have no inventory whatsoever, no in-house logistics.
On breaking even
We are looking at being profitable by second quarter next year. How we plan to do it is a bit of 'secret sauce'.
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