Flipkart is perhaps India’s largest home grown e commerce platform today and it has quite a success story to its name. Founded in the year 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, this platform was founded with a meagre Rs. 6,500 as a startup fund.
Both were Amazon techies working at creating the next big thing. Little did they know that the idea was just around the corner. Bored with their mundane jobs, Sachin and Binny wanted to create a search engine dedicated to e commerce websites. However, they soon realised that there were very few websites of this kind and this when they came up with something like Flipkart.
They left their jobs in the hopes of shaping the future of e commerce in India at a time when this field was steadily growing. Both of them loved books and founded Flipkart as a platform that catered to book lovers. Want anything, Flipkart made it available. In fact, that is what Flipkart means: Flipping things into the cart. A couple of months into the business, they realised they had a larger target audience to tap.
In the first few years of its existence, Flipkart raised funds through venture capital funding. As the company grew in stature, more funding arrived. Flipkart repaid the investors’ faith with terrific performances year after year. In the financial year 2008-09, Flipkart had made sales to the tune of Rs. 40 million. This soon increased to Rs. 200 million in the following year.
When Flipkart launched, e commerce websites faced one major problem, that of online payment gateways. Back then, not many people trusted paying on the internet. Flipkart tackled this problem by introducing cash on delivery and payment by card on delivery in addition to others. Flipkart was the first to implement the ‘Cash On Delivery’ facility, which every online shopping website in India offers as an option today.
Over the years, as faith was established in Flipkart’s business and easy delivery processes, the acquisitions became higher and the rewards became larger. With Sachin Singh as the Chairman of the company and Binny Singh as the CEO, Flipkart stands as the largest online e commerce platform in the country. Walmart is in talks to invest in this online platform and once the investment goes through, Flipkart and Amazon will stand neck to neck. What started off as only a platform for books has now become a platform for pretty much anything from technology to stationary!
Flipkart managed to open the doors to an e commerce friendly India and this was only possible because of the founders who created and not just thought. A true success story like this doesn’t come too often and when it does, it makes sense to stand up and notice.
