Strength in numbers

On the heels of freshly-forged alliances with search engine major Lycos and Shopper's Stop, Indbazaar.com is rushing into a slew of tie-ups. An intensive browse through its strategy to grab the eyeballs.

By Aparna Ramalingam

Amit Zaveri, one of the founders and currently the veep of Indbazaar.com, has a problem with the term horizontal portal. He prefers ''family portal''. Well, Indbazaar has all the attributes of a horizontal portal--and it's WAP-enabled--but does not want to be labelled as one. An interesting distinction as the dot.com faces its third-round of funding.

Why, till recently, the site did not offer the usual bouquet of services like e-mail and chat. "A portal is the starting point. We want to be the ending (sic!) point,'' stresses Zaveri. He adds: ''We are basically a set of interlinked verticals which will assist the family in decision making."

The idea bit Zaveri a couple of years ago, when researching opportunities in the field of medical transcription. Indbazaar.com was in the works for the whole of 1999. All Zaveri had was Zaveri Sr, and a computer operator. Barely six to eight months later, he has 80 full-time, and 30 part-time employees.

Its business model is the typical B2C school of thought. The main sources of revenue will be from e-Commerce, content sponsorships, and the creating and maintenance of sites. The subsidiary sources of income would be from co-branding arrangements. Indbazaar plans to break even by next year.

Moreover, revenues thanks to the co-branding tie-up with horizontal portal, Lycos (Asia) have already started pouring in. According to Zaveri, the deal with Lycos was conceived four to six months back. It's basically a co-branding arrangement. Indbazaar is providing 75 per cent of the content to the Lycos Asia site. Moreover, the India directory for Lycos has been put together by Indbazaar.

Says Mary Ong, CEO of Lycos Asia: ''We seek partnerships with the local Net players that allow us not only to share common goals but also add enormous value to one another and leverage off each other strengths. In short, there must be synergy. And we have that in Indbazaar. The partnership with the local content providers is key in the horizontal portal business we are in. We seek partners who are like-minded in creating a strong community of Indian Net users.'' Nods Zaveri: "Especially after the Lycos tie-up our viewership has increased tremendously. The alliance with them has helped."

Indbazaar has also tied-up with USAGreetings.com for on-line greeting cards. Then there's an alliance with Shoppersstop.com, the e-Commerce subsidiary of Shoppers Stop. Says Zaveri: ''We see Shoppers's Stop as a synergy--we are a family portal, they are a family store.'' The site also has plans to foray into the e-learning segment and is talking to a number of off-line and on-line players. Then there's a tie-up with Raja Net for travel bookings. Tie-ups with Crossword and Vijay Sales have been finalised for fulfilment purposes.

What's Indbazaar.com's vision? ''When we started, we did not know where we were going. We've evolved with user feedback," says Zaveri. He claims that he has survived the shakeouts in the dot.com world and the portal has grown stronger after the shakeout. "We want to have the deepest content site...that's our vision," says Zaveri. He agrees, however, that dot.com cannot be the only source of growth.

Says Pradip Shah, 47, Chairman IndAsia Fund, which picked up a 10 per cent stake in Indbazaar: ''Horizontal portals are going to be very valuable in the Asian markets in the near future. When Indbazaar came up with its proposal to us in 1999, what attracted us was its Indian ethos. All other Indian sites at that time were focussed on the NRI diaspora. This portal, on the other hand, was primarily domestic, and was aimed at the whole family. It had a good content, had a focus on e-Commerce, and had a strong revenue model in place.''

What next? Zaveri doesn't seem to be unduly worried by the boos.com and the reels.com of the world. He does, however, agree that some amount of shakeout is good. ''Dot.com offers a whole lot of learning and customisation-shakeouts bring in some sense of nervousness," he says. Zaveri feels that his site is in relatively safe waters. ''Our numbers have grown, and so has our stickiness." The company says that it has been a conservative ad spender, though it does have a total spend of Rs 1.5 crore thus far on advertising.

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