Those who sell office supplies to India’s professionals have rarely behaved in a very professional manner, but as online vendors increase their presence the sketchy stationary wallah may finally be forced to shape up or ship out.

Recognising the fact that India Inc. desperately needs decent office supply vendors, Arvind Sivdas and Siddharth Nambiar created OfficeYes.com, founded in May 2012 claims to be a one-stop shop for office needs built by professionals for professionals. During the conception of OfficeYes, the two co-founders, who are also both managing directors, considered the many woes of dealing with the traditional Indian stationary vendor. According to Sivdas and Nambiar, they found the inevitable “negotiating” and haggling to be an inconvenient waste of valuable time, and the insufficient product variety didn’t help matters. The utter lack of clarity in payment and tax structure is another source of pain which in turn is exacerbated by inflated prices.

Sivdas explained what makes OfficeYes a strong competitor, “Our technology allows us to have the largest range of office supplies, customised products and corporate gifts in one easy-to-order website. We deliver office products rapidly via a world-class operations infrastructure and offer free delivery above minimum order size. By aggregating demand and negotiating discounts with major suppliers, we are able to provide the best value to our customers on office supplies and furniture.”

Challenges

The co-founders said that talent acquisition, which initially was their biggest challenge, has now become their greatest asset. Elaborating on the matter, Sivdas went on to say, “Encouraging the best people to make a change and join a new organization is never an easy task, and attracting top talent to leave behind stable jobs and join a start-up is even harder, but we’ve done an amazing job of putting together an incredibly talented team. We have ex-McKinseys, Oxford MBAs, top IIT graduates and the best talent in Web design, marketing, product and more.”

When asked about lessons learned along the way, Sivdas and Nambiar emphasized that one should never compromise on building a great team.

Uniqueness

The idea of selling office supplies online isn’t unique, competitors such as the American office supply giant, Staples, have engaged in ecommerce for years. But doing it in India and getting it right, is something else entirely. This is where OfficeYes puts its American rival to shame. To be fair, Staples provides its American customers with a user friendly and highly informative website featuring a huge variety of superior quality products. However, when attempting to serve Indian customers Staples goofed up, badly.

Take the two drawer filing cabinet for example. OfficeYes.com features a reasonably good photo and a few overly embellished details of the two drawer filing cabinet offered, along with the price. At Staples.in the MNC has failed to provide pictures or even a detailed description of the filing cabinet and neglected to mention the price. An Indian customer who wishes to make an online purchase should not have to telephone the company, struggle with regional language barriers and wait forever to get a price quote. That defeats the purpose of online shopping.

One thing about OfficeYes.com that may annoy some shoppers is that one cannot browse the site without signing up and signing in. Ideally a shopper should be able to browse products and compare prices, then sign up if a purchase will be made, which is the case with Flipkart, Snapdeal and other successful ecommerce sites.

Also, this is an area where even the likes of Kishore Biyani have found it tough to crack the customer code. For example, Kishore Biyani led Future Group has been reportedly readying itself to sell Future Supply Chain and Staples Future Office Products business, which was a mix of online and physical stores.

Referring to the competitive environment, Sivdas said, “We have a number of direct competitors but they have little to no online presence and will not be able to compete with the service offerings of an e-commerce player in this market. In addition, we stand out by our uncompromisingly data-driven approach to understanding what our customers want and giving it to them at the highest standard. Our technology and marketing teams work hard to build sophisticated predictive algorithms to segment our customer base and predict what products they will like. None of our competitors can come close to matching us in this.”

Future plans

Sivdas spoke further on the company’s success and future plans, “We now have a great website, our operations team is delivering pan-India at rapid pace and our sales team is already out capturing the accounts of large blue chip companies such as GE, Microsoft, HCL, Tata Teleservices and others, as well as other SMB businesses across India. My future plans entirely revolve around growing OfficeYes.com into India’s biggest e-commerce website for businesses.”

As transparent and streamlined office supply options increase, perhaps Indian professionals can finally boycott tedious traditional vendors who refuse to improve.

venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

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