STATE OF THE CART

E-COMMERCE IN INDIA HAS COME A LONG WAY IN THE PAST 20 YEARS. WHERE IS IT GOING IN THE NEXT 20?

- ANJULY MATHAI AND ABHINAV SINGH

ONE DAY IN the late 1990s, when engineer K. Vaitheeswaran was browsing the web, he noticed an advertisement for books. He clicked on the ad and landed on a website called Amazon.com. Astonished by the business opportunities offered by the internet, he quit his job at Wipro and started India’s first e-commerce company in 1999, along with five others. From a single room with a desktop computer at the Newbridge Business Centre in Bengaluru, the six intrepid entrepreneurs launched Fabmart—an online platform to sell music cassettes.

From writing content and collecting payments to packing and shipping items and handling refunds, the Fabmart founders had to learn everything from scratch. Many of the problems were solved with jugaad ideas. Signing up music labels, for example, was a herculean task as no one knew of Fabmart or understood its concept. Unable to get the metadata of songs, the entrepreneurs bought just the cassette covers from the label. Similarly, to copy the content on to Excel sheets, they rented a marriage hall, spread bed sheets on the floor and hired interns to scan the cassette covers and enter the data. “Things are infinitely more convenient today,” writes Vaitheeswaran in his book, Failing to Succeed: The Story of India’s First E-Commerce Company. “E-commerce companies get well-structured and formatted metadata from book publishers and music or movie companies which they upload in bulk on the website at the click of a button.”