contentSutra news watch | E-Commerce

Amazon Launches Junglee.com Marketplace In India

2012-02-02T14:25:33Z

Hoping to tap into India’s rapidly growing e-commerce market, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is launching Junglee.com in the country today.

Junglee.com is not another “international Amazon” like Amazon.fr or Amazon.de. Rather, it is a marketplace that aims to connect buyers with online and offline retailers. The site offers 12 million products from 14,000 brands.

Amazon is also building a fulfillment center in Mumbai and has development centers in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai.

Users cannot buy goods directly from Junglee, although most product pages do link back to Amazon.com in addition to local sellers’ sites. The Kindle appears on Junglee.com but it is available only through Amazon.com, not from any local seller.

Some features of the site, however, are familiar. In November, Indian digital media site MediaNama reported, “Retailers have to provide XML based feeds of their products to Amazon, customized to Amazon’s categorization, and on completion of the sale, they will be responsible for delivery. Each retailer will be reviewed and rated by customers.

Junglee.com is not India’s only e-commerce site. The most well-known is Flipkart.com, founded by two former Amazon employees in 2007. It sells books—over 11.5 million titles—and other products and ships about 30,000 items per day.

Many Indian customers already use Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.co.uk offers free super saver shipping to India. “From the metrics we see, Amazon currently gets more traffic from India than Flipkart does,” Indian venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy recently told Reuters.

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Matrix Partners India Invests Rs20 Crore In Mobile Classifieds Firm Ver Se

2009-10-14T17:26:54Z

Matrix Partners India today said it has invested Rs20 crore in Bangalore-based mobile classifieds company Ver Se Innovation Pvt. Ltd.

Ver Se focuses on mobile classifieds in verticals such as jobs, matrimonials and real estate. The company had received seed capital from OnMobile Global Ltd and also has an international distribution partnership with that company.

OnMobile CEO Arvind Rao and Rishi Navani, co–founder & MD of Matrix India, will join the board of Ver se Innovation. Ver se stands to benefit immensely from the experience of OnMobile and Matrix Partners India.” said Virendra Gupta, co-founder and CEO, Ver se Innovation Pvt. Ltd.

Matrix Partners has invested in local search site Asklaila and classifieds site Quikr, apart from FIITJEE and ITZ Cash Cards recently.

DTH Players May Help Mobile Payments Gain Currency

2009-06-04T11:42:37Z

Direct-to-home service providers, who together have a customer base of over 10 million households, as per industry estimates, are all now offering recharge facilities through mobile. Increased adoption owing to this may help greater familiarity with mobile payment systems and help boost m-commerce.

Dish TV, India’s leading DTH service provider by customers, said it has signed up with Atom Technologies Ltd, a mobile payment company, to offer their customers the ability to recharge their DTH accounts through mobile phones. TataSky, the second largest DTH operator, had tied up with Atom in April. Sun Direct, a unit of Chennai-based Sun TV Networks, has also signed up with the same platform for their services. Atom is a subsidiary of Financial Technologies, the company behind the Multi Commodity Exchange. The company has tied up with nine major banks and Visa cards. You Telecom, Inox Movies, Rediff (NSDQ: REDF) Shopping, Indiatimes Travel etc. are among other large merchants who have tied up with the service.

Airtel Digital TV, the DTH service from India’s largest telco, said last month that it was extending its mCheck mobile payment system also to its DTH customers. Reliance Big TV also offers mobile payment facility through its own network.

News Roundup: Travel Portals Claim Profits; No Conflict Of Interest, Says TRAI Chairman

2009-05-15T05:23:50Z

Despite a fall in air travellers, four travel portals claim to have made a profit for the quarter ended 31 March, according to this Mint story. MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Travelguru and Yatra claim to have made a profit in the latest quarter. MakeMyTrip claims to have made a net profit of Rs1.5 crore for the quarter. Others did not offer numbers. While industry observers are sceptical about the claim—India’s airlines saw a 10% drop in passenger traffic last fiscal—portals say other high-margin services such as hotels, cruises and package holidays, help them make up for the loss in travel bookings.

New Trai chairman J.S. Sarma put an end to the controversy over the conflict of interest involved in him, a former TDSAT member who has sat in judgment over Trai rulings, now becoming chairman of the telecom regulator. Sarma told Business Standard that he will recuse himself from decisions involving his past judgments. This means if Trai wants to appeal against a TDSAT verdict, that decision need not be cleared by Sarma.

News Roundup: New TRAI Chairman, RBI On Safer Online Transactions

2009-05-07T06:25:26Z

—J.S. Sarma (pictured, right), a member of the Telecom Disputes Settlement And Appellate Tribunal, will likely be announced as the next chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Business Standard reports. Sarma was not among the 13 candidates who were originally shortlisted by the selection panel. BS columnist Sunil Jain had pointed out on Sunday the conflict of interest involved in Sarma becoming the head of TRAI. “First, it is curious that a person who has been sitting in judgement on TRAI should now be asked to head it. Some of these judgements have been so full of holes and so blatantly pro-government (see ‘New-age yoga gurus at the TDSAT’, April 6), the TRAI will want to contest them — how is that possible when the man who delivered them is to head TRAI?

More moves, after the jump.

—India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, has asked banks to put in place a dual-factor authentication process for online transactions, reports The Economic Times. This will mean a second layer of security, either through a mobile-phone based verification process, or a password generator, in addition to the normal username-password combination. While safer transactions will provide a boost to ecommerce, if the process is seen to be too cumbersome, that will backfire, too.

—India Today chairman Aroon Purie, who recently said he will not spend any more on digital media, has been named the chairman of the International Federation of the Periodical Press, exchange4media reports.

Rajiv Jaitly has quit as president, marketing and sales, at DB Corp., publisher of Dainik Bhaskar, India’s second largest read daily, shortly after completing a year at the firm, reports e4m. When we contacted Jaitly, he said he was moving back to telecom, but did not reveal which company he was joining.

Kijiji Launches In New Avatar, Matrix Partners Funding Results In Rebranding

2008-08-11T18:39:27Z

We had first reported the Matrix Partners and Ebay backed free online classifieds website Kijiji.in going in for a re-branding. Quikr.com, it’s new avatar, has now gone public. Afaqs quotes Jiby Thomas, co-founder and VP Marketing, Quikr.com, as stating that the Matrix Partner funding in February (prior to which Kijiji.in was a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay) resulted in the re-branding. Kijiji was previously part of the Kijiji International network and has now been spun off as a separate entity. Kijiji.in however redirects to Quikr and the new logo sports the old unit. Guess part of the deal includes brand and domain licensing, brought in by eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) which owns the Kijiji network. The firm also plans to expand revenue streams, “Our revenue will be based largely on advertisements, but we will opt for different formats of advertising such as display ads. Later, we may charge a listing fee for improving the visibility of posted ads,” states Thomas. Quikr is being considered to be launched in Jaipur, Lucknow, Goa, Surat and Nagpur in addition to the existing base of 12 cities.

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FutureBazaar To Re-Design, Clocks Rs 62 Crore Revenue

2008-08-10T09:55:32Z

Futurbazaar,com, the online shopping window of the Future Group owned Pantaloons Retail is expecting to cross Rs 180 crore in revenue in the new fiscal on the back of a re-launched website. According to BS, the now year old online retail arm of Pantaloon Retail has already clocked Rs 62 crore. The number seems to have fallen below projections as indicated in a report in April, predicting revenues to be around the Rs 75.5 crore mark. The report quotes Sankarson Banerjee, CEO, Future Bazaar, as stating Wipro Technologies will be redesigning the portal at a cost of Rs 20 crore. They will be expanding product range and categories, including regional brands.

The portal also plans to retail regional language movies. FutureBazaar currently sells around 800 Hindi movie titles and 400 regional ones. It will also add to its regional books inventory with a plan to push sales currently around the 1,000 mark to 12 lakhs (1.2 million). Interestingly, they are also looking at an Argos’esque offline information center that can hold product catalogues of the entire product range gleaned from the website.

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Obopay, Grameen Solutions Tie-Up For Mobile Payment Services For The Poor

2008-08-06T20:14:10Z

Mobile payment service provider Obopay and Nobel Prize winning Dr. Yunus’s micro-finance firm Grameen Solutions, have tied up for a mobile banking initiative. The Bank A Billion initiative proposes to bring banking services to a billion of the world’s poorest people by 2018. The initiative will start initially in Mumbai and Bangladesh beginning October, 2008. Services includes access to savings, money transfer, payments and micro-credit.

US based Obopay had recently concludd a $20 million fourth round of investment led by India’s Essar Communications amongst many others. James Pearce, at mocoNews had mentioned that Obopay wants to become the Western Union/PayPal of the mobile world, and in order to do that it had to get 41 licenses to become a registered money transfer agent just in the US.

We had recently covered RBI putting a halt on mobile banking services. Further to the same, a Paymate spokesperson recently informed us that all was business as usual since they were compliant with the proposed set of guidelines. The final guidelines are expected by end of August, which leaves plenty of time for the initiative to adhere to the final set of guidelines.

As an aside, Grameen Telecom (GTC) is a non-profit company that provides mobile phones to villagers in Bangladesh. It’s sister concern, Grameenphone, is a GSM-based cellular operator with more than 50% of market share with 10 million customers as of Dec 2006.

For releases, immediate updates or general faff, Cerius is now live on Gtalk, AreYouCerius (at) Gmail.com

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RBI Puts Halt On Mobile Banking Services; Final Guidelines Expected In 2 Weeks

2008-07-27T15:31:46Z

The Reserve Bank of India has asked banks to keep their mobile payment services on holds until final guidelines are issued. However, mobile alerts for credit/debit, balance enquiry and other are service in the nature of providing information will be continued to be made available reports BS.

Importantly, all mobile-based money transfer services that have not received “explicit approval” from the regulator are to be suspended. On the operator end, Airtel has recently put in a huge marketing thrust for its mobile banking service. However, they claim in the report that they are merely passing on information and this move is aimed towards those services that need money to be transferred to a master account before payments being made. On the banking front, ICICI claims its mobile banking facility, which enables internal account transactions, falls within the guidelines and is hence complaint. No comments as yet from mobile payment services providers. Will update as we have it.

With reference to the norms, the final guidelines are expected in two weeks, in time for various public sector banks like SBI and Union bank to launch their own mobile banking services.

We had previously covered the draft norms here.

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Google Adwords Launches Netbanking; Ties Up With DirecPay

2008-06-30T20:03:00Z

Just when you thought you knew all the usual suspects. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Adwords has launched its netbanking service and tied up with DirecPay, a subsidary of BCCL’s Timesofmoney. The option list for Netbanking currently features only eight banks supported by Direcpay (full list here). Some digging reveals DirecPay has been actively soliciting tie-ups with the likes of Inox and SOTC to name a few. Expect similar announcements to combat rival CCavenues as the usual fare of mobile apps and wap products are announced.

Kijiji Re-Brands Itself To Quikr.com

2008-06-30T19:52:00Z

Matrix Partners and eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) backed free online classifieds website Kijiji.in has re-branded itself as Quikr.com. The site as of this night was still undergoing migration and had a referral to Kijiji India. A notice on Kijiji indicates more changes Quikr might feature more than just a cosmetic and logo change. The beta is expected to go public soon.

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Sulekha Ties Up With CareerBuilderIndia, CricInfo With Myntra

2008-06-26T15:32:00Z

—- Sulekha has tied up exclusively for content with CareerBuildersIndia.com for its ‘Premium Jobs’ section. The section will be co-branded although on checking it wasn’t live as yet.

—- Cricinfo has tied up with Myntra.com, the online personalized merchandise portal, to offer cricket merchandise. Cricinfo users can customize T-shirts, mugs, mouse pads and posters based on cricketeres. ~~Like the above,~~ ~~can’t find anything live on the website as yet~~, The product is branded as Cricinfo merchandise. We had previously covered Myntra tying up iwth ibibo and HolidayIQ for Personalized merchandise.

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RBI Drafts Norms On Mobile Payment For Banks

2008-06-15T10:43:00Z

The Reserve Bank of India has issued draft guidelines on mobile payments, a few highlights from the 12 page document below:

Mobile Payment has been defined as ‘information exchange between a bank and its customers for financial transactions through the use of mobile phones. Mobile payment involves debit/credit to a customer’s account’s on the basis of funds transfer instruction received over the mobile phones.’

—- Only banks licensed and supervised in India can offer mobile payment services

—- Only INR based services should be provided

—- The RBI guidelines on Know Your Customer would be applicable to customers opting for mobile based banking services

The RBI has proposed dividing mobile banking into two levels. The basic level comprises of information such as balance enquiry, SMS alerts for credit or debit statuses and other information providing services. The second level would deal with financial transactions such as payments and transfers. Since the level of risk in the first level is lower, differential levels of registration could be applied. However, registration for any level of service is mandatory.

Considering KYC norms for mobile banking will be applied by the RBI and not the TRAI or DoT is a considerable advancement of security issues considering the norms followed by banks and financial institutions are more stringent than those for telcos. However, there is no clearance on which body will mandate mobile banking regulations for telcos. If mobile payments have to take off there will have to be interoperability between data gathered by both banks and telcos, if not a different set of norms for telcos offering users mobile banking facilities. Furthermore, its already a problem having a mobile number linked in as a universal identity across various accounts. Throw in mobile number portability, multiple bank accounts and multiple layers of KYC verification in and you cross the thin red line from security issues to privacy issues.

Technology and security standards and more details in the draft here.

Times/BCCL Takes Stake in Travel Portal TravelChaCha

2008-06-13T14:12:01Z

BCCL, the parent company of Times of India, has taken an undisclosed stake in Culture Holiday, the parent company of online travel portal TravelChaCha.com, adding to more crush in the now-crowded online ravel sector in the country. Terms were not disclosed. More details here.

Paymate Raises Rs 38.57 Crores In Series B Funding

2008-06-10T18:16:00Z

Paymate has raised $9 million (Approx Rs 38.5 Crore) in series B funding from Mayfield Fund and existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers and Sherpalo Ventures. Nikhil Khatau, MD of Mayfield Advisors will join the board. Amount of stake sold remains undisclosed although BS states Ajay Adiseshann, founder and MD, Coruscant Tec and co-founder and director Probir Roy, will retain a majority stake even after two rounds of funding.

Paymate had initially raised $5 million (approx Rs 20 Crore) in a first round of funding. This series B round is expected to fund their growth for the next 18-24 months states Roy. The mobile payment gateway, prior to its funding, had been very active this year in tying up with banks (current count at 13), operators and services using Giftmate.

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Tanla Acquires $15.8 Million Stake In Finnish-based Openbit

2008-06-05T19:43:00Z

Tanla, an Indian provider of mobile services, said it acquired an 85 percent stake in Openbit, a Finland-based mobile payment software company for $15.8 million in cash (Euro 12 Million)reports IDG via NetworkWorld. The remaining 15 percent of the company, currently held by Openbit’s management, will be purchased in two stages over the next two years, bringing the total to $18.6 million. Tanla currently uses Openbit’s products and services in the U.K., Ireland, Dubai, and Singapore, and expects the acquisition to give the company access to Openbit’s relationships with device makers and mobile operators. In addition, by integrating Openbit’s technology into its own services platform, the company will be able to expand past mobile entertainment, mobile marketing and advertising and interactive TV into the mobile payments market. Release.

MouthShut Launches City Guide

2008-05-30T03:10:00Z

User review portal MouthShut has gone in for a re-design, adding local listings and reviews to the mix. Currently it lists entries from 20 cities and small towns covering restaurants, malls, pubs and clubs. According to the release, it seems more like a navigation tweak with citywise categorization of content that already existed on MouthShut rather than a new feature. We had recently covered the launch of Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO) Local in the same space, which covers four cities. Burrp is another player in the same space who we recently revealed to be funded by Network 18 CEO, Haresh Chawla.

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Cleartrip Launches Videos

2008-05-29T21:16:00Z

Cleartrip has launched Cleartrip Videos gleaned from the Short Flicks Festival which had been sponsored by the DAG, KPCB and Sherpalo funded online travel portal. The one to three minutes long user submitted videos are across multiple cities. This is a good addition to the Lonely Planet content tie-up feature, Small World. Integrating both under a city-wise feature would be ideal instead of having seperate entities, the user generated videos would be a good balance to Lonely Planet’s text content.

Industry Moves: Infomedia-CEO; MakeMyTrip-CMO; Microsoft-Director, Marketing

2008-05-27T09:38:00Z

—Lakshmi Narasimhan, Head of Business Development for Network18, has been appointed CEO of Infomedia India. Readers will remember that Network18 acquired Infomedia last fiscal. Narasimhan will expand the portfolio of Infomedia titles. Prakash Iyer, who was CEO & MD of Infomedia will now be MD. [more at exchange4media]
—Mohit Gupta has joined as Chief Marketing Officer of MakeMyTrip.com. Prior to joining MMT, he was VP Marketing (Flavours) at Pepsico International. MMT Co-founder Sachin Bhatia, who was earlier the CMO will now focus on new lines of business. [more at afaqs]
—Manish Agarwal, formely the VP Marketing at Rediff.com (NSDQ: REDF) has joined Microsoft, Rediff confirmed to ContentSutra. Agarwal has joined as Director, Marketing at Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT).

Ezeego1.com Ties Up With redBus For Bus Tickets; Corrigendum

2008-05-26T11:07:00Z

Corrigendum: It had appeared to me (Nikhil Pahwa, Editor, contentSutra) that Ezeego1 had repositioned itself as a travel meta aggregator. The company informs us, and on checking we’ve verified that, Ezeego1 was launched as a travel Meta aggregator. It’s not a case of repositioning, and the error is regretted.

Original Story, published on 20 May 2008: Ezeego1.com has tied up with redBus.in to provide bus bookings on the site. The release quotes Charan Padmaraju, Co-founder redBus, stating “We noticed that there are many customers who fly to a particular destination and then take a Volvo bus to cover the last leg due to the lack of airport facilities in some towns.” Forward thinking considering a ticket sold is a ticket sold, regardless of where the referral comes from. Ezeego1 on the other hand has re-positioned itself as a travel meta-search site. The deal seems in line with its new found mindspace, apparently positioning itself independent of travel and tours company Cox&Kings, and opening up it’s gates to third party providers.

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