Healthkart, Ecommerce Store for Consumer Healthcare Products

Gurgaon based entrepreneur, Sameer Maheshwari, is making authentic health products accessible to all through his venture, Healthkart. Swati Maheshwari finds out more exclusively for YourStory.inSameer, what is the idea behind Healthkart?

HealthKart is an e-commerce store aiming to be one-stop shop for all health and fitness related products. We have a strong focus on authenticity of products, as healthcare is one of those segments which are plagued by a lot of fake products.

Interesting. Tell us about your background.

Prashant Tandon and I founded this company in 2010. I am a Stanford graduate while Prashant is from Harvard. Animesh Jain (Founder & CEO of iTasveer) joined us a few weeks after we started Healthkart. All of us also happen to be from IIT Delhi. We had a strong urge to do something in the healthcare space and e-commerce happened to be one of the opportunities that presented itself in good time.

How do you market your venture?

We are currently trying out all kinds of paid marketing methods in measured doses. Some channels that are proving to be fruitful are Google Adwords and Facebook ads. We are also kick starting our SEO efforts to get some organic traffic going.

Tell us about the competition in this space.

There are several competitors in individual categories. Our top level categories are nutrition, diabetes, home devices, eye care, personal care, baby products and beauty. Some categories like baby products and beauty already have well funded competitors. However, we don’t really worry about the competition at this stage. We’re trying to setup our own operations, technology and logistics to deliver a consumer experience that can win us trust in the market.

How much investment did you make at the time of inception?

We invested a few lakhs for the initial bootstrapping and then we raised 1 million dollars as our first round of investment from some angel investors.

What kind of growth do you expect in the next couple of years for Healthkart?

We intend to be aggressive while staying measured in our approach. Our early numbers show some good traction. Delivering a great end-to-end experience, along with the peace of mind that your health will be safe in our hands, by ensuring authenticity of all products that we catalog, is our priority.

What are your expansion plans at Healthkart?

We are exploring various channels to market our service. The expansion plan involves setting up operations to handle a larger scale, sourcing directly from manufacturers in various categories, building the right team etc. Having said that, we are hiring in all departments, so if anyone who is reading this, and is interested, do drop in a line.

To know more about this venture, do visit their website www.healthkart.com