abhimir

Our main aim with this blog post was to create awareness about our market, the 'online selling' market in India. To depict the problems that customers which are trying to sell online face, we used an adjacent market, the 'online buying' market to compare and contrast, and to show how 'online buying' has been made easy by FlipKart and Letsbuy, and why their is need for a similar revolution in the 'online selling' side. Also as Flipkart is the pioneer in E-Commerce in India, we have a lot of respect for them, and this is our hats off to them. And Flipkart took in in good humor, and even tweeted about the blog and the video, to its followers. So I think we did that part right.

I am the creator of the video, and also a member of PriceShred. We are trying to highlight a problem with 'online selling in India' which our customers have repeatedly mentioned to us, and which we are trying to solve. This video tries to drive home the message, that online selling, in its current avatar in India, is broken and there is a need for a better solution. This is where PriceShred with its motto ‘Making selling online easy’, comes into the picture. Also as one of the pioneers of ReCommerce in India, we hope that this video will help in creating awareness about the online selling problems in India, why now is the time to start talking about this, what market dynamics have lead to creation of these problems and possible solutions.

While making a sweeping statement about such business models not working, I guess the op failed to take notice of Gazelle.com, which has been in operation for 3 years now, has raised $46.4M in total with the last round being a series D of $22M. And guess what their business model is, arbitrage on used electronic products. So safe to say, such models can and do work.

I also believe that these models will increasingly become more mainstream, because they save people 'time', time which is increasingly becoming the most precious resource that we have. You save 2 hours of time for someone, and pay him $40-50 dollars less than craiglist or ebay, and I am sure you can find a large percentage of people for whom the opportunity cost of 1 hours is more than $20-25, and voila, you have customers.

Almost 35% of the startups are from US. I wonder why they chose Chile, instead of applying in the numerous US based incubators.