We will get 100,000 sellers by Dec 2015, says Ankit Nagori of Flipkart

All e-commerce marketplaces have a common battleground-the small offline seller.  Ankit Nagori, Senior Vice President at Flipkart , talks  to Goutam Das of Business Today about his company's strategy to enable offline businesses sell online.  


Q. When did Flipkart realise they have to be a marketplace?

A. We have always been a marketplace. Just that the number of sellers were very low. There is a huge focus on increasing the numbers. That realisation happened two years back because it gets a lot more selection on board because India is a very large country. When there is large selection, it leads to better competition, better pricing. Now we are close to 30,000-plus sellers.  We will get to 100,000 by December 2015. Flipkart is now a 100 per cent marketplace. The largest seller in different categories is not the same guy. In mobile and electronics, WS Retail still has a large share of that because its expertise is sourcing phones from China etc. If you look at Clothing, Kids, they are not the largest seller.

Q. So how do you see the future of marketplaces panning out?

A. There are three crore SMEs - that's a conservative number. It is what we can track today. All of this people have to move online if online is to become the default source of buying. The future of online marketplaces will be the future of SMEs in India. The mode of transaction will change from offline to online. These sellers who are talking to customers in their catchment area, will talk to a lot more customers across the country. We will get to 100,000 this year but that's a fraction of what the number could be. How soon are SMEs enabled to sell online.

The real enablement will come when once they start selling; they don't know what online sales mean. What is the requirement of the catalogue? What quality standards do they need to adhere to? For clothes, you need to do a cataloguing. But no one can hire models. So we have to created an ecosystem of cataloguing partners. We have 100 partners over 20 cities where people can go and get their clothes catalogued on models. Then there are requirements on sourcing raw materials. We will help them in connecting to their raw material providers. They need training for staff. Another bottleneck is lending in India: the collateral-free debt. We are partnering with NBFCs where sellers can source capital to fund.

Q. How much of this is already happening?

A. Some portion of all of these has happened. The cataloguing piece is in full flow. There will be 1,000 partners for cataloguing by end of the year. As part of a pilot, we have already enabled capital to more than 50 sellers. We provide data and risk profiling to NBFCs.

The aim is to scale it up. The 50 sellers have grown 5 to 10 times. The training bit is happening. We have launched a seller analytics platform where sellers can see what is selling in their locality, loses price, demand. A seller can see how many sellers are selling cheaper than him. So if it is an iPhone, how many people are looking for 16 GB and 32 GB. This tool is free right now and available to all sellers. We want to go very deep. What we will do in future? We want to enable our sellers to source from international markets. China is a huge manufacturing country. Like mobile accessories: today, they don't source from China directly. We want to help them partner with people. That is one long shot.

Q. Everybody is now a marketplace. What is Flipkart's USP?

A. The one reason a seller will sell on one platform versus others is the amount of money he makes with the least amount of headache. The key is seller experience. We are the quickest in terms of seller payments. We make payments on the fifth day after the sale. We want the customer to have received the product. Five days is the best metric in the industry. Then we have the maximum footfall.