Indian Amazons on the Rise

DNA Money: Books were one of the few things that initiated ecommerce on the Web. Amazon was the first mover then. But in India it seems like the trend of selling booking through the online medium is catching on now with Indian bookstores finally getting serious about a presence in cyberspace. Within the next one year, the country’s largest bookstore chain, the Shoppers’ Stop-owned Crossword, will be looking at an online retail store. Also Odyssey, a Chennai and Hyderabad-based book chain, will be there in the next six months.

Among the ones that are already having online stores include Landmark, a pioneer in book retailing that was bought over by Trent last year. It has  1.1 million titles available for purchase at the click of a mouse. There is also Oxford Bookstore and Magna Books book retailers with an e-commerce capability.

Even now not so many book retailers are going online which is very surprising as Globally, online retailing of books is second only to airline ticketing in terms of e-commerce. Even though online book retailers over the world have hit turnovers of close to $ 8.5 billion (Rs 39,000 crore) in India book selling online has yet to kick off in a big as it seems that the Book sellers are very busy focussing on their offline businesses.

Also one of the reasons for books not selling online is pointed out by Himanshu Chakrawarti, COO of Landmark who feels that online payment by credit cards is a problem. According to him a typical reader still prefers to visit the book store for making his purchases. Besides, confidence in credit card payments for small ticket size purchases is still not as good compared to travel bookings. But despite these problems he is optimistic about the future and feels that in three to four years we should see see e-tailing succeed with Indian book lovers.