Dated December 19, 2002
The Financial Express - Online Edition

The overall scenario for eCommerce of the B2C variety in India may look bleak. But investigate a little and interesting stories of online commerce seem to be mushrooming all over various product categories-from fruit to downloadable software-where goods are bought and paid for entirely online.

What's more, you may even find an instance or two of traditional businesses that have gone 100 per cent online over the last few years.

Take the case of Pune-based fruit merchant Prakash Bang. Mr. Bang whose mango gifting business was set up in 1990 has taken the business 100 per cent online today. He takes orders on his website Bangsons.com from clientele who want to gift fruit to people in India, the US, UK or Middle East. All the payments he receives are online-either through credit cards or the net banking route.

"All my customers pay online today," says Mr. Bang, Chairman, Prakash Bang and Sons. It helps that 80 per cent of his clients happen to be international customers who are accustomed to online payment mechanisms.

Another company which is totally dependent on online payments for its downloadable software is C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), India, which falls under the Ministry Of Information Technology, Government of India.

"We have a couple of online activities. One is that our multilingual software is downloaded the world over. And more recently, we have used online payment mechanisms to accept delegate fees from across the world for the ongoing conference HPC Asia 2002 for which we are the organizers," says C-DAC Webmaster Shri. Jaideep Chitnis.

Take another small business- alltimegifts.com and wishbycards.com. Both are run by a Delhi-based company and as the name suggests, they too are in the business of online gifting and once again depend entirely on online payment mechanism.

Says Gagandeep Singh, Director, Operations, of alltimegifts and wishbycards, "We depend on online credit card payments and Net banking and are a 100 per cent online business, catering largely to the NRI community."

Alltimegifts has about 3,000 gifts on its catalogue and once the customer chooses and pays for the gift online, the gift is actually bought and delivered to the recipient in India. In the case of both Bangsons.com and Alltimegifts.com, buyers and recipients could reside in different parts of the world. While alltimegifts undertakes only domestic delivery, Bangsons undertakes delivery overseas as well, through a tie-up with the logistics company DHL.

Bangsons has a tie-up with orchards in Florida to deliver fruit to the US residents and delivers mangos, pomegranates and custard apples in India, UK and the Middle East.

The company has tied up with BlueDart for its local deliveries. Once Bangsons receives the airway bill number from the courier company, it puts it up on the site so that customers can actually track their packages on the Bangsons website, courtesy a link to the courier company's online tracking mechanism.

Most of these merchants have opted for third party payment gateway service providers like CCAvenue (which in turn has tie-ups with banks providing payment gateways) given that these service providers tend to charge less and incorporate more features.

Says Shri. Chitnis, "What consumers also need to be made aware of is that the merchants never store the credit card numbers. So the fear of the credit card number falling into wrong hands, just because it's online, is quite unfounded."

"It took us a while to build trust but we kept at it, followed up every delivery with a phone call to the customer and took similar measures to ensure that we kept building customer faith," says Mr. Singh on what it takes to build an online business.