"We are planning to expand our business to Canada": Deepak Agarwal

Tell us about how the brand gets incepted?

My wife Sadhana gave up her thriving IT career to be with our first born full-time. We were looking at creating some extra income while letting Sadhana also enjoy motherhood. We set up a site called Desi Vastra in 2004, selling Indian apparel for kids in the US. From these humble beginnings, the company has had many transformations over years, until it finally took the avatar of DesiClik.

While the recession brought bad tidings to our first business after four years, we decided to use the competition in the market, in the recovery phase, to our advantage. The Indian population in the US was growing exponentially. However, not all towns in the US offered stores for the growing community -- many still drive an hour to find an Indian grocery store. With more than 3 million Indians living in America, and the expanding space and possibilities of online shopping, there was no single shopping portal where people could find everything Indian and talk to someone in their language while shopping for them. Added to this was the fact that when they bought from sites in India, delivery took longer, there was no easy way to return goods and service was not reliable. In 2010 we started tapping into this yawning market gap with theindiabazaar.com, which we finally re-branded as DesiClik.com in 2014.  

What makes you India’s leading cross-border e-commerce platform? Tell us about your USP?

We can firmly say that we are specialised in selling Indian products in the US. What makes us stand apart is the fact that all our vendors are based out of the US which makes the delivery faster along with the option for replacement. Moreover, if the customer needs any clarifications or has any questions regarding our services and the order they have placed we have our customer representatives available 24//7 at their service. All our products are shipped by vendors in the US and are imported already by them - this helps us provide quicker delivery and the customer can buy the products with confidence without worrying about quality, service, and returns.

Tell us about the innovative services that you’ve introduced in the business recently.

We have recently worked on integrating DesiClik with Shipstation, an online shipping solution, to enable processing, fulfilling and shipping of orders easily for our vendors. We have also started the gifting facility for our customers based out of India.

What is the key feature of your website?

For us, the user experience is of utmost importance. To ensure smooth performance, we have upgraded the website recently, making it more user-and search-friendly. Some of the key features on the site include order tracking, simple cancellation, and easy checkout. Help is just an email or phone call away. In addition to emailing us, our customers really like talking to us. We also have the option for gift certificates.    

How do you ensure continuous traffic (and repetitive one) on your portal?

Retargeting advertisements and Facebook and Google AdWords help us bring continuous traffic to the website. Periodic newsletters and sales are a good way to bring in repetitive customers.

What are your scaling up plans?

We are planning to expand our business to Canada and provide fulfillment service to expand the business. With India being our major business source, we are looking at growing the business in some of the major NRI-focused cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad. We also have plans to start a B2B service to connect vendors in India with distributors in the US.