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Click!

The Amazing Story of India’s E-commerce Boom & Where It’s Headed 

Jagmohan Bhanver & Komal Bhanver

Hachette India

310 pages; Rs 499

This Amazing Story of India’s E-commerce Boom fails to amaze because it has few surprises to offer. The book claims to be “a sharp study” of the evolution of e-commerce, but it’s more a textbook compilation of events and developments around eight start-ups—JustDial, MakeMyTrip, InMobi, RedBus, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm and Pepperfry. 

The book also disappoints because there is little conversation between the protagonists and authors. What we have instead is embellishment in the form of quotes of founders and chief executive officers that are already in the public domain. Ashish Shah, co-founder of Pepperfry, may have been an exception — he’s mentioned in the acknowledgements as someone who “tirelessly answered our incessant queries and spent time with us even on the eve of a $100 million fund raiser”.

Published at a time when the biggest deal in Indian e-commerce is being scripted — a likely merger of Flipkart and Snapdeal — the writers are absolutely silent on it. Signs of this consolidation have been around for months now but the book has clearly missed the buzz. In fact, it describes Snapdeal, which is in reality in countdown mode, thus: “In a space cluttered with several players, a few of whom are formidable enough to worry most others, the Snapdeal founders remain unfazed. They have their sights locked on the end-user.”

The book scores in touching upon most of the overarching issues in the e-commerce industry, including valuation markdowns of star companies and investors taking charge. “While neither the investors nor the founders have spoken of this publicly, there have been indications that strategic decisions within the company (Flipkart) are increasingly being driven by the investors and the founders have relatively little say in the same,” they write. 

The research that’s gone behind the book, which took almost two years to complete, seems to hold it together. It takes off from the Rediff era of late nineties and then goes on to government’s IRCTC portal — from that moment on, e-commerce carved a path for itself in India, the husband-wife duo write. 

The book attempts to connect with the global scene to explain the Indian e-commerce story fully. It tells us that the seeds of e-commerce were sown way back in 1971 when the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was used to arrange a sale of an undetermined quantity of cannabis between students at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The book calls it “a seminal occasion in the history of e-commerce.’’ 

But it was eight years later, in 1979, that the first online shopping system was displayed. UK-based Michael Aldrich’s invention started as a cross between a modern-day B2B and B2C model, it seems. Two years later, Thomson Holidays became the first B2B platform for online shopping. Amazon, eBay and Alibaba emerged much later.

The research on the featured Indian start-ups is rigorous but the book offers little beyond that. Expectations of a “something-more” moment never arrives. Almost halfway through the book, the authors have devoted chapters on the three companies that are in the middle of M&A action currently — Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm. These chapters talk about the friendship between the co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, also about Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, their education, and the journey that follows, most of it familiar to a reader who knows a bit about the sector. 

Some things, however, make for interesting reading. For instance, the book talks about Flipkart’s first customer — V V K Chandra. “Finally, on 21 October 2007, a little beep on the screen informed the Bansals that they had their first hit. It was a young man from a small town called Mahbubnagar in Andhra Pradesh (now Telangana). Chandra ran a small company for web consulting. He was a book buff and was scouting for John Wood’s book — Leaving Microsoft to Change the World — but was not getting it anywhere.”

Chandra did not know that his request for the book had created a stir of excitement (and some panic) in an apartment in faraway Bengaluru, where two anxious pairs of eyes gazed at the order from their very first customer. Binny Bansal located a copy at a store in Indiranagar (Bengaluru), borrowed money from a friend as he had forgotten his wallet, and Flipkart’s first product was packed and delivered.

In the Snapdeal narrative, the authors take you to the interiors of India. In June 2011, a village in northern India decided to change its name from Shivanagar to Snapdeal.com Nagar, the book says. That was in return for the Snapdeal founders donating 15 hand pumps to the village. The villagers got what they wanted the most—water. Such anecdotes are mostly known, but they may continue to hold your attention. Click! on the whole is a good read for anybody who’s woken up late and is deeply interested in the history of e-commerce.