Making e-com easy -- the indiamarkets way

A large ayurvedic company puts up its requirement of huge amounts of turmeric on the Net. An auto component major maker needs suppliers and goes online.

A factory is on sale and is looking for buyers among Internet users. A demand for steel tubes from a remote place in Baroda district is optimistically posted.

Great business on the Net? Not really. E-commerce needs a lot of prodding, which is what indiamarkets.com, one of the country's first B2B sites, is doing.

Theoretically, B2B e-commerce is simple. Buyers meet sellers on the Net and trade happens.

In reality, things are different. Up to 90 percent of the SME segment (which forms a large part of the suppliers) have no access to the Internet, or are hesitant to try it out or simply don't know how to.

Which means that SMEs were losing out on the "largest opportunity of the next decade. And SMEs have a tremendous export potential that few people realise,'' said Mr D. Sriram, Vice-President, India Markets Online (IMO), the company behind indiamarkets.com.

IMO's strategy to get round the problem of access. On the one hand are all the 'buyer postings' on its site where large corporates put up their requirements.

On the other is the company which works offline to identify suppliers who can match the requirements of the buyers.

The suppliers are contacted -- "we even go knocking at doors'' -- and invited over to IMO's e-business centres, from where they can log in and enter their quotations.

The e-business centres -- there will be 30 of them by the middle of September and 70 in all later -- are fully equipped with computers, instant connectivity to the Net, telephones, fax machines and even mini-conference rooms, where the users can hold meetings with their business associates.

E-biz centres have been set up in industrial areas such as Peenya and Bommanahalli in Bangalore, in Noida and Faridabad.

More are planned in specific industrial areas such as Moradabad for the brass industry, Kanpur for leather and Krishnanager for granite.

The company has identified 54 such critical hubs in the country. It already has 30,000 registered users and 12,000 companies on its site.

Revenues for the company will come in from value-added services including consultancy. IMO also offers an e-biz package for Rs 10,000 a year, which includes 105 hours of browsing free, 500 photocopies, 500 faxes, 50 hours of use of the conference hall.

A e-biz customer could use the centre anywhere in the country. The company also plans to offer video conferencing facilities, linking up the various e-biz centres in the country.

The company is in the final stages of tying up with a logistics company and is also tied up for quality. Certification is available to users who can get a 'Dun's no' from Dun and Bradstreet. The Dun's number and an Indication Risk Score help validation and verification instrument.

IMO is also trying to get companies which have their own B2B portals to offload what Mr Sriram calls the "management bandwidth'' to itself.