Journey of a newbie running an eCommerce store in India- Straight from the heart
Editor’s note: eCommerce in India is very lucrative and many people plunge into it not cognizant of the obstacles on the way. Definitely a very good learning curve, the path is filled with tough calls and often leads many into the trenches. Here, Premshri Jain who started out Bartanwale.com shares his experience of being a first time internet entrepreneur…
I have been working in my father’s trading company of kitchenware. My life was pretty simple compared to my peers as I didn't have any stress and was happily working with my father. But I had a sense of incompleteness and wanted to do something.After few days, all ecommerce buzz and media ads came in and I got excited that I will work on ecommerce for our line of products so one of box designer who is working for us for long time came and gave me the phone no. of a designer for web application. I was happy things were moving.
As time passed, I began to chart out the complexities of laying my website. And I give a Cheque of Rs.xxxxx to the developer. We were receiving update regarding web developments (things I didn’t understand) and after a few months, we were no where near to site and things started getting worse- developer went off to his home place where communication was poor. Our daily communication came to weekly or month communication and after 5 - 6 months the project was live and I was happy the site was live. But I understood the really meaning of ecommerce where flashy web sites is 5% of ecommerce business and rest is logistics, vendors, customer services- all this info I got from Esparks- 1st Premiere eCommerce Showcase where Mekin Maheshwari of Flipkart gave his views on ecommerce and its development.
After few months, I began to wonder what will happen if i need to change site or what if tomorrow developer does not help or whatsoever? So we thought to build or use existing platform and after a few failed experiments, we got the experiments right and stop the custom build web site and started using Magento Web Apps.
This was part of our learning while developing ecommerce site and now was more important part of site payment gateway- Dad suggested to go for Lowest TDR by Paying Higher Setup Fee and decided to go with the EBS team.
Now, a very important part was yet to be decided- the name. We were still discussing names of our site as the name which we opted for were generic in nature cart, kart, shopping, etc. And few days, I saw a site in the name of laptopwale and discussed the name with my dad and he immediately replied bartanwale.com. This was a lucky break for our ecommerce story.
Again we went with the whole processing of domain change with payment gateway with additional charges and additional delays and it took us nearby 3 – 4 months to get everything back in order from where there was no turning back.
Things were easy, but were receiving zero – 1 orders per week and we started working with marketplace tradus and they are really teachers for us in ecommerce they taught us to deal with customer complaints, how to process the orders and how to maintain the ecommerce and person to whom we are really thankful is Vandana and Richa Bhatnagar, tradus helped us in journey of ecommerce by making our products to come in tradus deal we were really happy after receiving orders of 200 pieces thanks to them but unfortunately we faced technical hurdle with courier companies for which we had to stop the deal for 2 days out of 3 days allotted to us and it was loss to tradus for promotion of this deal but we were able to dispatch 200 pieces fast and safely to customers but things went weird after this deal with tradus but still today we are receiving order thanks to this deal for the same product.
Now came the real twist- the bank acquirer which process your visa and mastercard stopped facility to us as we were ‘non-performing’ which means Zero Transactions to them since opening of the account. And we again did all the documentation to associate process people of EBS to reprocess our application to enable the services of visa and mastercard. 2 – 3 months later, after rigorous phone calls from us to their associate process person, we were able to enable the services of visa and mastecard on our site. We were happy for them but just 1 week before from today, again we received the email from associate person stating the acquirer bank has stop facility of visa and mastercard to us as were no performance of 1 year. We informed them that we just went through the entire process a month before but in vain. The associate process madam just asked one question- do you have any emails in march stating renewal of services? And secondly, for renewal of the visa and mastercard, you will need to rs.6xxx to us and wait for 2 – 3 months and I just said to them “Thank You White Collar”.
After this experience, we started looking for payment gateway company, we are still using their services for netbanking and sbi pg but we thought that's enough, let’s try some other payment gateway company and we went to payupaisa, which worked out well.
This was our journey of ecommerce. Yes, we’re not some big shot entrepreneurs but with a support system like this, newer entrepreneurs will only die.
We will like to thank the following people in order we met them
Our first developer for teaching us never outsource your core business, To payment gateway ebs for teaching us communicate only in email (otherwise white collar) and use multiple payment gateways, to tradus – Vandana and Richa for Teaching us the real meaning of ecommerce, to yourstory for Esparks 1st ecommerce showcase for teaching us ecommerce is not about flashy websites as said by Mekin
Special Thanks to
Nitin from Zepo- for providing free extended trial of zepo shopping cart and to Jubin of YourStory for counseling us.