I've been shopping at Flipkart

The entrepreneur bug seems to have bitten too many young Indians of late! We've been seeing entrepreneurship camps, been hearing about seeding (that was a pure biological term in the 90s) and angels (and this was reserved to the Bible) and have been having our own share of college dropouts idolising Bill Gates! For someone who truly believes in the power of potential and will, it's just amazing to see this enormous rush of energy and I am convinced that some of these ventures will take India from being a pure service oriented market to a product oriented one.
It is in this context that I want to write about Flipkart.com. It is an online book store, modeled in the same lines as of Amazon started by two IIT Delhi grads. There isn't anything spectacular about Flipkart, because they are just following the lines of a model started off by Jeff Bezos 15 years ago. But somehow I like Flipkart (as they say it all lies in winning the heart of the customer!) for it's simplicity, for the fact that it's founded by two young Indian lads, for it's excellent share of rare books, for it's excellent price mechanism where the same title is offered at varying prices based on the print, publisher etc, for it's extremely search engine friendly design, for it's easy and flexible payment options, for it's very prompt delivery and excellent packing (the books I ordered came bubbled wrapped and in a cardboard box) and for it's decent customer service (when they could not procure a book I ordered from any of their vendors, they gave me a discount coupon on future purchages and I just got an alert from them saying that a book that I said I was interested in was available with them now). The site has a user friendly design with common features like comments and related books, but considering the fact that they are still growing, these features are not very mature and useful. But overall I will recommend this site for others within India to shop for books - because it does a decent job of delivering books on time, has a solid collection of books and because it's a startup right here at Koramangla, Bangalore!
Pure book portals are a relatively new concept in India and it's an area with huge potential. It is pretty disappointing though that almost all the players are sticking onto the tried and tested ways of retail or online book selling and have not ventured out to try out new avenues. Typically most Indians are not tuned to buying books and most books sold at these outlets are prohibitively expensive for the common man (mango people according to Imtiaz Ali - watch this) - because of this business model most major players are restricted to a very small pie of urban corporate class. There lies a sea of opportunity for these players to reach out to the average Indian - through regional language books, second hand books and networking the many local run libraries in the thousands of small towns and villages of the country.