Flipkart.com, a Bangalore-based online book retail firm, has raised venture capital funding from Accel Partners. Accel termed it a small investment without divulging the value of the deal.
Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal said, the company will utilise the funds to strengthen its backend operations and exploring new sales channels.
“A large part of the investment is being used to create robust systems to ease the book buying and selling experience. The areas include logisitics, marketing, sales, supplier relations and new channels for customer access,” he added.
The online store currently has around four million book titles in its portfolio and targets customers of all age groups. It retails books in fiction and non fiction category including books on literature, arts, medicine, IT and entertainment. It plans to explore further in book retail and doesn’t have any immediate plan to add other products like music or film titles in its portfolio.“There are lots of services to be added in the books distribution area itself,” reasoned Bansal. Flipkart is also working actively in developing infrastructure that will allow publishers to directly sell their books on the site.
Asked about the competition when several other big players are aggressive about the space, Bansal stated that there are some good players in this domain and each one is approaching the segment in different ways.
The company currently operates two distribution centres in Delhi and Bangalore and targets three more centres, one each in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata by the end of this fiscal. Flipkart posted a revenue of Rs 5 crore in 2008-09 and its site attracts 5 million visitors a month.
In a similar genre, Indian Angel Networks recently invested in Mumbai-based Kwench, which is an online library service provider for corporates.
