Speaking exclusively to IndianMediaBook about the inception of ClickIndia, Pankaj Agarwal, Founder, ClickIndia, said, “While looking around for various requirements I realized that there were many sellers for an item, finding them was very difficult with no medium where it was aggregated. This led to the idea of developing a platform where buyers and sellers could connect each other quickly and thus started Clickindia.”
ClickIndia is a self-funded venture, where buyers and sellers meet. There are no charges for posting listings or sending responses.
Opportunity v/s challenges
Agarwal believes that with the steady increase of internet usage, classified market has witnessed the rapid growth since 2007 and it is pegged at $15 billion globally. The online classifieds industry in India is still at a very early stage and under penetrated.
According to Agarwal trust, convenience and actual transactions are the three major challenges for online classified segment in India and globally.
“Trust, because buyers have no way of authenticating seller identity and product condition. Convenience, because it is very difficult for buyer to find product in neighbourhood. Transactions, because buyers and sellers need to meet in person every time for transacting,” opined Agarwal.
However, with the rapid increase of e-commerce transactions year on year and buyers’ growing habit of upgrading products regularly indicates that lot of used products are going to come in the market for sale and online classified players can expect huge transactions due to this in coming years.
The mechanism
ClickIndia has 15 million+ user base in which 60 per cent is from tier 1 cities. Clickindia exists in 40 cities and plans to extend its reach to more tier II and tier III cities.
The venture is targeting two communities, one is sellers who have products/services to offer and on the other side are buyers who have some requirement for the sellers offering.
Apart from farther reach, there is a large presence of buyers on the site which helps sellers generate adequate number of enquiries. Also, ClickIndia decided to work on above mentioned three major challenges one by one and currently it is working on solving trust building.
Team ClickIndia consists of 7 people with varied background and expertise to manage the day to day operations. It also has a mobile site wap.clickindia.com which is growing at a faster rate than desktop site and approx. 45 per cent transactions are being done from mobile site.
Future plans
The penetration of online classified is low in India despite having second largest internet population but it is growing at a rapid pace and expected to perform better in coming years.
Last year ClickIndia acquired sharingdais and acquisition has been an exciting experience for both the teams. Agarwal informed that the venture is open to merger and acquisition and it will continue to look for opportunities that complement its business.
“The company has plan to work much harder on above mentioned challenges that are trust, convenience and transactions with an objective of taking user experience to the next level”, concluded Agarwal.
