Brothers take e-biz route for auto spares

New Delhi: For Sunil Dhingra, co-founder and CEO of Jazzmyride.com, an online car and bike accessories seller, the bug to be an entrepreneur on e-commerce space struck early in his life, when he was just in school.

“The passion to start something in e-commerce was there since childhood. During my school days I sold an item on Bazee.com (acquired by ebay later) and the experience of the message that we have received your money and now you have to shift the order amazed me. This introduced me to the world of e-commerce," says Sunil.

The dream remained in his heart and Sunil focused on completing his MBA from Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management (SITM), Pune in 2006. He later joined the corporate world and worked for six-seven years in TCS and Infosys.

But the growth of e-commerce finally encouraged Sunil to set up his own venture. Thats when he started Jazzmyride.com with his brother Mukesh Dhingra, in 2011 with a vision of making it easy for anyone to discover innovative and best-in-class car and bike accessories. Mukesh had experience in national distribution.

Jazzmyride.com was started with couple of thousands in pockets. Initially Sunil was working alone, but now the company employs 49 people. They targeted the niche segment as they believed that going into a horizontal space will require deep pockets. Also auto accessory sector was highly un-organised and the brothers wanted to be strong in this space than even other horizontal players.

“Unlike the West this space in India was highly un-organised and that was an opportunity,” says Sunil. Jazzmyride.com, doesn’t work on marketplace model like that of Flipkart and Snapdeal but do sell their items on marketplace on-line retailers. “We went for inventory led model as the growth in this model will be high and also other companies went for marketplace model due to restriction on FDI in e-commerce space in multi-brand retail,” says Sunil.  

He points out that in inventory led model, the firm is able to control the quality of the products and the supply side. The brothers hold 100 percent equity in the company and have seen only profits since its inception. “Some investors have approach-ed us and we are in talks with them,” reveals Sunil.

The company right now offers some 13,000 different accessories and will increase the catalogue to 50,000 by the end of 2014. It doesn’t buy all the products but does just-in-time procurement and analyses data to anticipates orders. The firm is now looking to expand in car services segment and is planning to open retail stores and fitment points to solve the problem of fitment of products bought online and to create a hybrid O2O commerce play (online to offline and vice-versa).

It also has a vision to be the largest seller of auto accessories and parts across all sale formats; online and offline as well as retail and bulk. The variety of products and accessories available on the website ranges from the most economical to the elite. It has also tied up with international brands like Turtle Wax (USA) and ABRO (USA).