Indiaplaza.com to have 1 million products on the Net

BANGALORE: Indiaplaza.com is a new e-commerce portal launched in India to offer products to consumer online. The company offers around 50,000 products, and plans to increase it to 10,00,000 products by March 2000. The product categories include entertainment, home and grocery, gifts and fashion and other products besides offering services like free email, matrimonial, classifieds, horoscope and recipes.

Vijay Shah, CEO and President, Indiaplaza.com, says, "We want to become the preeminent Internet-based shopping destination for Indian products and services through the largest source of product listings. Shortly, we will be introducing a slew of additional service lines to promote our brand." With Cyberlaws expected to be in place shortly, Shah hopes to make use of the opportunity to become one of the early birds to catch B2C wave. The company is in talks with an US venture fund to raise around Rs 150 crores in the coming financial year. This will be used for building infrastructure, development of content, establishing call centers for customer service, and promoting the brand. The fund will be utilized in 12-14 months.

Speaking on the strength of the company, Davinder Luthra, CTO and e-commerce strategist, comments, "Our strength, market position and dominance lies in our people and our ability to work as a virtual organization spanning three continents. We are operating on a policy of free shipping on 95 percent of the products sold on the site." The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India, and in London, U.K. The company is projecting around Rs 4.5 crores turnover for the year 1999-2000. In India, the company is expanding its employee base to around 100 in coming three months.