Snapdeal was founded in 2010 by Bahl and his partner Rohit Bansal. It started as a daily deals site selling meal and spa vouchers, but morphed into an online marketplace in 2011. Presently, it offers a variety of 4 million products from over 20,000 sellers.
Recently, digital marketplace eBay led a USD 134 million (Rs 830 crore) investment in Snapdeal.
Bahl discloses that Snapdeal’s success is owed to the avoidance of the expensive model of building in its own inventory to the detriment of a platform which allows retailers to offer products to buyers, regardless of space barriers. Snapdeal’s success, Bahl thinks, is also due to the extension of its business beyond Indias major metros, to the millions of consumers in Middle India. Today, 50% of Snapdeal’s orders comes from tier 2 and 3 cities.
Snapdeal plans to have between 8 and 10 million products in its online catalogue by the end of 2014. It also plans to double the number of sellers to 50,000 in the same period.
Research firm Forrester estimates that Indias ecommerce market will touch USD 8.8 billion in 2016, though some say it could be as high as USD 16 billion by then. The countrys internet users have risen to 200 million, with over 20 million of them transacting online.
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