Let’s put it this way. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal have audacity and balls.
- The Forbes Magazine in an article on Flipkart
This is what the Forbes India July ‟12 article had to say about the Bansal duo-Sachin Bansal and
Binny Bansal, the founders of Flipkart-India‟s biggest e-commerce company. Since its inception
as an online book selling store, the company has gobbled up a registered user base of more than
2 million users in India in less than four years since its inception in 2006. This start-up company
is gaining fast dominance in product categories like music, videos, games, computers, electronics, mobile phones, healthcare products and personal products. Apart from that the forte of the
company lies in the gargantuan book stock it has. It is the largest book store in India with over
11.5 million book titles.
It has registered sales of nearly 2.5 million items in almost all categories. More than 30,000
units per day are sold from its online portal or 14 items per minute. Their official website attracts a mammoth traffic of 12 million potential customers per month and it‟s no wonder that
their website is rated amongst the top 30 websites in India.
The founders, Sachin Bandsal and Binny Bansal, now in their early 30s are childhood buddies
who grew up together and went to the same college (IIT-Delhi) to get a degree in Computer Engineering, and in five years built Flipkart, India‟s largest e-commerce entity. Though they were
both in secure jobs, they felt their learning curves will be far greater if they could do something on their own. They wanted to start a business venture which would be tailor made for the
Indian consumer and could make a difference to their lives.
As with all the first time entrepreneurs without a business background, the Bansal duo had to
be quite pragmatic about investing their hard earned personal money of 4 lakh rupees. They
decided to start off with a site that would sell products online which were not heavily priced so
that the customer won‟t have the “Touch-n-Feel” factor. Hence the choice of books was natural.
And this Rome was not built in a day either. Setting up bank accounts, getting an online payment option and moreover convincing the publishers to share their inventory with these two
ambitious debutant entrepreneurs was a humungous task. And warehousing such huge stocks of
books which are not weather proof was also a challenge. There were times, when they would
pick up, pack and deliver the products on their own.
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