“Suvir Sujan is the Co-Founder of Nexus Venture Partners.
Suvir has been an entrepreneur and one of the pioneers of consumer Internet in India. Suvir has been Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Baazee.com, the leading online marketplace in India that merged with eBay in 2004 to form eBay India. Post the merger, Suvir was Country Manager, eBay India and Regional Director, Asia Pacific, PayPal. Suvir has also worked as a Management Consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. He began his career at Nortel Networks.
Suvir has an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where he was the Co-President of the South Asian Business Association, and a BS in Electrical Engineering (High Distinction) from the University of Maryland. He is a charter member of the Internet and Mobile Association of India and a mentor to several entrepreneurs in the consumer services sector in India. He has also served on the board of the Global India Venture Capital Association.”
I see a lot of promise on the Indian e-commerce front! Consumers shopping online is growing exponentially and mobile driven commerce is accelerating. Companies like Snapdeal and Flipkart are becoming household names. But what is forgotten in this e-tailing revolution are the unsung heroes — the e-commerce enablers — most importantly logistics and supply chain/inventory management. Let’s run through the process: assume a consumer buys a product from an e-commerce site and chooses the cashon- delivery payment option (which is still the predominant payment method in India), opting for one-day delivery.
How does the e-commerce vendor manage its orders? How does the vendor manage the warehouse? How does a vendor manage suppliers and get inventory in a timely fashion to be shipped to the consumer? If a customer pays cash, how fast and securely does the cash reach the e-commerce vendor? This is where the e-commerce logistics companies like Delhivery and iinventory/order management software companies such as Unicommerce come into play. They are the less talked bout heroes that facilitate the trade or in other words, they are the commerce in e-commerce!
Just like the tower companies and other mobile telephone equipment companies powered the infrastructure revolution in the wireless telecom space, logistics companies will drive a revolution in the e-commerce infrastructure space over the next decade. In other developed economies, some of the basic infrastructure around logistics and retail technology was already in co-existence. E-commerce players had to solely focus on building out the front-end by plugging into the existing infrastructure. India, though, is seeing e-commerce players and infrastructure companies growing simultaneously and adapting to each others’ needs as they scale to form a robust ecosystem.
This article was originally published at: http://indianvc.blogspot.in/
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