Mysportcart.com has been founded with a mission to fast
deliver sports, health and fitness equipments at low price to the customer's
doorsteps. Based on a customer centric approach, the company is devising
innovative ways to bring quality products with many advantages like free
shipping, cash on delivery, online and mobile payment options, and easy refund
policies. Its founding members-graduates from IIT- foresee an unprecedented
growth in the e-commerce culture in India where there already exists a large
proportion of technological savvy population. By minimizing the delivery time,
the company wants to create an environment of real shopping experience for its
customers. We had a talk with Pankaj Garg, Founder of Mysportcart to understand more
about his current and future plans.
What is my
mysportcart.com and what value it brings to the table?
Sport is fast catching up dreams and imagination of common
person. What earlier was mostly a luxurious hobby for few is now becoming
professional aspiration for many. Thanks to improving medal tally in Olympics
and increasing dominance in cricket. However world class sports equipments are
yet not available in India beyond selected cities. The primary difficulty with
offline retailers in other cities is to maintain inventory of expensive items.
On the other hand, sports enthusiasts are very particular about specification
of their sports gears and always want fresh equipment when they are spending a
good amount on it.
mysportcart.com is an online shopping destination that
caters these needs of sport enthusiasts in cities where stock is mostly not
available or does not meet required specifications. Without compromising on
quality and authenticity, we fast deliver our goods at low price to customers’
doorsteps.
Who are all founders
in this venture?
mysportcart.com has been founded by graduates of IITs. Prior
to venturing into ecommerce, we have worked for around a decade in leadership
roles in technology companies. We are all sports lover, particularly cricket,
table tennis and swimming. We also recruit people who have interests in sports.
How did this idea
come to your mind?
I recently got associated with a sports club in Bharatpur,
Rajasthan. The city is more known for its bird sanctuary. Last year, I was
attending a cricket tournament where I noticed none of the playing teams had
equipments even matching to the level of equipments in my last company. I
casually shared this with my friend from Kanpur who could relate with the issue
and the idea germinated in his head. While I was more excited to venture in
education space, huge response to beta launch of mysportcart.com hooked all of
us with it.
How are you competing
with any other sports selling ecommerce companies?
As of now, we are actually not competing with any other
company in the space. This is because India is inherently a very huge market
and no one company can meet its demand level. Most of the market is still
untapped and real competition will begin only after total supply starts
exceeding demand level. We believe all other companies are helping in
increasing sports awareness as well as building better ecosystem.
Our current focus is to continually source high quality
sports and fitness equipments of leading domestic and international brands
directly from manufacturers or authorized channels so as to provide best price
along with best services.
How old is mysportcart.com
and how many customer visits and what about conversion?
We just launched in April 2012 and have been getting a very
encouraging response so far. Our volumes are growing by 50-60% every month. Our
conversion factor is also fairly high since we are focused on one specific
category.
What all product
lines do you have and how many coming in near future?
Currently we have best brands available in sports and
fitness segment. We will be adding outdoor adventure gears pretty soon. We
already have shoes in our catalogue and sports apparels will also be in very
soon.
What is your overall
strategy going forward and where do you see mysportcart.com in next 2-3 years’
time?
Our strategy is to grow fast enough. Our efficiencies keep
increasing as we continue to grow and cross some target levels However when we
say grow, we do not mean just sales volumes but also our relationship with
sports enthusiasts. We see ourselves contributing a lot more to the sports
fraternity in next 2-3 years’ time. We also believe this a better strategy to
market ourselves than spending endlessly on other marketing channels. For this
reason, we have been able to provide better discounts to our customers.
Did you raise any
funding? Are you looking for any VC/Angel funding?
As of now it is self-funded. We may look for funds only
after meeting our targets of next six months.