Flipkart's Sachin Bansal said technology will change everything in the coming days.
Sachin Bansal of Flipkart, one of the six unicorn startups to be awarded NDTV's Indian of The Year Awards this evening, said when the company started out eight years ago, no one even wanted to shop online.
"I don't think anybody expected what has happened in the last seven or eight years...No one expected e-commerce boom," he said. "When Binny and I, we started Flipkart eight years ago we thought ecommerce was already happening because there were a lot of e-commerce websites. But, we realised no one wants to shop online," he said, speaking on the challenges before the e-commerce industry.
"We have solved a lot of problems since then," he said, "from creating a market place or finding talent." The initial problem that Flipkart faced was that of logistics, which he said, "did not exist in India at that time."
The first challenge, he said, was not from the competition "but to make online shopping mainstream."
The retail space in India is scarce and consumers do not get a great experience provided the opportunity for e-commerce to prosper, Mr Bansal said. In the coming years, technology will not just change e-commerce but a lot of new areas "like access to health and education," the IIT graduate who left Amazon in 2007 to co-found Flipkart.