It was a tough call for Vishal Mehta to quit a well-paid job at Amazon.com in the US to start his own online retailing venture in India.

Mehta’s father, a businessman in Gujarat, had his doubts about the venture, given the failure of numerous dotcoms in the US.

After much cajoling and convincing, Vishal Mehta got the nod from his family.

The founding team included his Amazon colleagues Vijayakumar Subramanian, Sachin Oswal and Neeru Sharma.

“It was by chance we got hold of a survey in 2007 indicating the impending IT boom in India. We were confident of the potential in e-retailing, but wanted to do something different,” says Mehta. This led to the birth of Infibeam, an e-retailing firm that offers electronic goods, garments and jewellery on the Internet.

Advantage Ahmedabad

Unlike most other IT or e-commerce companies, Mehta zeroed in on Ahmedabad to set up the venture. He wanted to tap the resources at IIM and have a spacious office at a reasonable cost.

“After interviewing an IIM-Ahmedabad professor for a top job we gave him his appointment order. The only question the professor asked us was — will we be there tomorrow?” recalls Mehta.

Back then, raising money was a difficult task for dotcom companies.

It was no different for Infibeam.

Mehta’s experience in technology, finance and corporate development at Amazon came in handy. The team decided to be conservative in spending the initial capital of Rs 10-15 crore raised from various sources.

“There were many setbacks in the beginning. We made mistakes and failed a few times. Strategies were reworked and refined many times. Instead of rushing in with too many things, we decided to meticulously put one brick at a time in our attempt to build a beautiful wall,” says Mehta, who had started his carrier with Dell.

Today, Infibeam has more than one crore retail products and 50 lakh visits.

Cloud-based portal

Once Infibeam got established, the focus shifted to securing sourcing, logistics and warehousing.

This led to the launch of BuildaBazaar.com, a cloud-based online portal that allows even a novice in IT to set up his own portal within minutes and start selling anything from doughnuts to diamond jewellery.

Enterprising people without any business background can also build their Web site and start selling products offered by Infibeam.

Sellers on BuildaBazaar.com can easily add the list of products sold by Infibeam to their own Web site and start selling them. In this case, they earn a 1 per cent profit while Infibeam handles the delivery.

Those who sell their own products have to pay a 1 per cent commission to BuildaBazaar.

Doesn’t BuildaBazaar compete with Infibeam? “Definitely it will. The business model has been designed like that. We do not look at them as competitors but as partners. In a few cases, they get to manage Infibeam’s delivery in remote locations,” says Mehta.

Mehta was pleasantly surprised when an artisan from a small town in Rajasthan managed to sell a gold coloured artificial diamond studded tooth cap.

“When I first saw it on the Web page, I wondered who would be interested in it. But it was sold out in two days. I was even more surprised when my 13-year-old niece wanted to buy it,” said Mehta.

BuildaBazaar also hosts established brands such as Airtel, The Mobile Store, VIP, Hidesign, Adlabs Imagica, INRECO (Indian Record Manufacturing Company), Crossword, Bombay Dyeing and Prestige.

It has 15,000 live stores doing business. A few non-government organisations have also sold candles and mops on the portal. Infibeam and BuildaBazaar together employ about 1,000 people.

>suresh.iyengar@thehindu.co.in

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