The ninety-one year old Apeejay Surrendra group is a diversified industrial and services conglomerate with operations in tea plantations, hotels and restaurants, shipping, real estate, construction and financial services. Last year, the group went into three e-commerce ventures all in a span of eight months __ teastall.com, stockmarkit.com and oxfordbookstore.com. indiamarkets met up with Priti Paul, director, Apeejay Surrendra group and the force behind oxfordbookstore.com, who talked at length about the future of e-commerce in India and the pitfalls while getting into the act.

indiamarkets: Why did you get into e-commerce?
Paul: We already had a brick situation. Drawing on an 80-year tradition of fine book retailing knowledge of Oxford Bookstore, we wanted to add value to our services to everyone in the book chain. Due to the online entity, book buyers now have access to a broader selection of over six million titles, lower prices, value-added content, customer interaction and personalised services. Besides catering better to the customers' needs, publishers benefit from the promotion of their mid-list, front-list, back-list books. Authors benefit by getting their books which otherwise might not get widely distributed into readers' hands. Hence the transition from bricks to clicks was only natural.

indiamarkets: What are the pitfalls you encountered while getting the website up and running?
Paul:  First of all, the markets were not really ready. The persons recruited for the online ventures were doing this sort of work for the first time. Everyone involved from top to bottom was going through the same learning curve. We hired people with potential and drew on local abilities to compete worldwide-consequently work ethics also had to be matched up to global standards. Hence, there was a high pressure environment built up while work was going on. Secondly, here in India we did not have well-developed payment gateways. We needed foolproof transactions to happen. That took some time to be worked out.

indiamarkets: How have the sales been affected in the three months since the bookstore went online?
Paul: The Oxford Bookstore completed renovation in June 2000. We registered a 25 per cent increase in sales after that. It went online on September 2000. The internet sales have been contributing 3 per cent to the 25 per cent rise in sales ever since. This has happened because we are providing customers with multi-channel facilities. We have been selling all over the world, catering to all categories of customers. We got a Rs 60,000 order from California, as well as a Rs 200 order from the backwaters of Kerala. What is interesting is that the highest value of proceeds came through the credit card route while the largest number of orders came through the cash on delivery route.

indiamarkets: What do you think of the future or e-commerce in India?
Paul: We are waiting for broadband availability through cable to happen. There will be a burst of internet related activity and the Net will be inside 55 million homes, within the next three months to a year. This will broaden our reach to a large section of informed, urban customers.

indiamarkets: With most dotcoms going bust in recent times, what are the safeguards that you have kept while doing business through the internet?
Paul: I would like to say at the outset, that we have structured our e-commerce ventures and their future growth on pure, business fundamentals. We are not here for the short run. We mean business and not charity through the net. We have therefore worked out a strong and resilient revenue model for all the sites associated with the group. Those dotcoms which fizzled out did not have a definite revenue generating structure. Also we have commenced e-commerce only where we already have a strong bricks and mortar entity. No new forays for us, through the net.

Contact details:
Apeejay House,
15, Park Street,
Calcutta-700016, India.
Tel-91 33 2297242/2295455 (extn 141, 142)
Toll free: 1 600 33 3399
Fax: 91 33 2172075
Email: oxfordmail@apeejaygroup.com

The author can be contacted at shehla_indiamarkets@yahoo.co.in