Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

HealthKart, gurgaon based online retailer has raised $5M from Sequoia Capital and Omidyar Network as part of series B round.  In April 2011 HealthKart had raised $1M from Kae Capital and Sequoia Capital.

Primarily the investments will be utilized in strengthening the product portfolio, supply chain system and good chunk of investments will be deployed in marketing.

Healthkart, is founded by two IIT-D graduates – Prashant Tandon and Sameer Maheshwari. They have able to bring in some talented entrepreneurs in their core team, for instance Animesh Jain is head of Online Marketing & Product, Animesh was CEO and Cofounder of iTasveer.

Healthkart which began as online health store has expanded its product portfolio, now it sells baby care, cosmetic products as well.

Lets have a look at their monthly traction:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	–	150K
Unique visitors (users)	–	69K
Page views	–	1M
Total visits	–	150K
Avg time on site	–	8:00

-Hitesh, vcBytes

a2zbaby, a Mumbai based startup is a new e-commerce player in the baby care product vertical. a2zbaby aims to provide an e-commerce storefront where parents can find and discover products for their baby and buy it at will.

a2zbaby offers, chemical safe products, considering the safety and development of the child at each stage. a2zbaby delivers wide range from diapers to toys, car seats to cozy bouncers, food maker to laundry detergent and specialty child care products to designer cribs.

a2zbaby is founded by Premanshu Singh (IIM-A alumnus) and Kapil Chawla (MDI Gurgaon Alumnus). Premanshu has rich experience and worked in ITC, J&J and Webaroo Technologies while Kapil has worked with Infosys and Webaroo. Since they being the parents of new born babies they felt the need of an online store where user can find different brands under one place.

a2zbaby has more than 2500 SKU’s, across more than 25 brands, on offer now. Parents can visit the portal, explore products, talk to a product expert and buy it online. a2z doesn’t levy and shipping charges, Cash On delivery is available for orders above 999, provides 24*7 customer support and delivery time varies from 3-7 days depending on the user location.

a2zBaby, is very fairly simple to use. They have well planned page layout with neat categorization. Checkout is very easy and simple and works like a breeze.

a2zBaby directly competes with Hushbabies, Babyoye, FirstCry.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

BigshoeBazaar, an online wholesaler and retailer of shoes, apparels etc has closed its series B round of investment of $9M from Narayanmurthy floated Catamaran Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. The deal was almost done after BigshoeBazaar raised its series A investment.

With this new investment Catamaran Ventures has picked up 13 per cent stake in the online firm for Rs 26 crore, Nexus Venture Partners has picked up 7 per cent stake for Rs 14 crore. The funds will be used to strengthen supply chain and setting up warehouses to support growth at the front-end,” Bigshoebazaar India Co-founder Manmohan Agarwal said.

BigshoeBazaar primarily runs a B2C portal Yebhi.com formerly known as Bigshoebazaar.com which sell footwear mainly and now it has added few more categories like Clothing, jewellery. Yebhi.com does around 4000 transactions on a daily basis. Bigshoebazaar runs a wholesale network across the country targeted at small retailers in Tier2 and Tier3 cities to source Global brands like Adidas, Nike etc. which in general don’t have access to such brands. Bigshoebazaar has also started franchisee business, where it offers shoe retailers to use it brand and retailers source the footwear from the company.

You may check out Nitin Agarwal’s interview here, Nitin is one of the Cofounder of BigShoeBazaar.

Lets look at the monthly traction at Yebhi.com:

Worldwide
Unique visitors	840K
Page views	9M
Total visits	1.2M
Avg time on site	8:50

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Don’t force Guest to signup before Checking out:

Its a big turn off for me when i need to signup for the service to buy a product, i generally prefer to transact as guest, when the experience is good and satisfying i signup on that online store on my next transaction. Basically as an e-commerce store you need to have a very good reasons why forcing guests to register to purchase products. Try to simulate the offline shopping experience. Do you have to open an account when you buy stuff from a new retail store? Don’t make that mistake online. Allow guests to check out.

But you also need to sell reasons why guests should register. It’s all about making it easy, now and in future.

Slick and Fast -

Facilitate user to checkout easily, the process should be as fast and slick as possible. Remove any Ads which may distract users, never ever try to up sell or cross sell in this page. You can do that in product page or when the product is added to the cart. Here the objective should be to collect the payment, If out of greed you tend to entice the users to choose other stuff there is a high risk of them abandoning the cart.

Collect user feedback once payment in through -

Once a visitor has converted, rather than show the standard confirmation page, why not also ask for some feedback on their experience? User can use tools like Surveymonkey to create feedback form and collect their responses. You can add some of the questions like -

• Were you able to find products you were looking for easily?
• What you liked or disliked the most about our website?
• Please tell us how we can improve your next visit?

This qualitative feedback is priceless to e-commerce portals. Not everyone will put their views but believe me you will collect feedbacks from the smart users and don’t forget to inform them once you make the suggested changes.

Handle Errors Gracefully

Problems occur during the check-out stage. Cards are declined, people enter invalid email addresses and they forget to specify their preferred delivery method. To cover all eventualities, you should display messages that are:

• Contextual
  Put the message next to where the error occurred.
• Useful
  No “Error code 21″ messages please. Write friendly, useful error messages, such as, “Sorry, we believe your email address is invalid. Did you accidentally add an extra full stop or space?”
• Conventional
  Error messages should be red. People understand that red indicates a problem.

Flipkart has raised its second round of venture funding from New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management. Sources familiar with the development told VCCircle that the new round of funding was closed a few months back and is believed to be in the tune of $8 million to $10 million. Flipkart earlier raised funding early venture capital firm Accel India.

This development comes as Flipkart has expanded from being an online book retailer to offering products in movies, games and music. It also plans to launch sale of software like Norton Anti-virus, Adobe, Windows, and others. Indian CD/DVD market was worth approximately Rs 10 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow to Rs 16 billion by 2013 at an yearly growth rate of 10 to 15%, said Flipkart.

Flipkart currently has over 6 million titles listed ranging across all categories. The Bangalore-based company is targeting revenues of Rs 100 crore by March 2011, said a  recent release. The funding from Tiger Global, which has backed companies like local search firm Just Dial and coaching institute T.I.M.E, will help in this expansion. The new round of funding for Flipkart had attracted several venture capital firms, said a source.

Flipkart had revenue of Rs 25 crore in 2009-10, Flipkart said in an interview to CNBC-TV18 recently. It was set up in 2007 by IIT Delhi classmates Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who later worked at Amazon before starting Flipkart. The company has a team of 200 members and currently operates from offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi.