Even though India is running high on ecommerce fever, some of the niche categories like sports hasn’t yet taken off. In spite of a strong demand/market (for sports product), there aren’t a lot of portals dedicated to buying sports accessories online in India.
eSportsBuy is a New Delhi based startup that recently launched its online store aiming to bridge the gap between the need and availability of quality sports & fitness products throughout India (free delivery/CoD available too). The startup sells anything from equipment, apparel, nutritional products, footwear or accessories and is targeting semi-professional and professional sports players as well as health and body-building enthusiasts.
If you look at these businesses, they mostly compete with offline stores and one way for them to beat these stores is to form partnership at Point of Context – i.e. make gyms/aerobic centers as your affiliate, take orders and deliver instantly (i.e. distribution, distribution and distribution).
It’s like the Via model for such products, as the fact of the matter is that all of these niche stores also compete with established ecommerce stores like eBay, Yebhi and maybe decathlon, Flipkart, Infibeam in the near future. That is, it’s not just offline, but online competition too. To keep things in context, the search volume for these products isn’t as high as the other categories in ecommerce space, so a horizontal ecommerce site stands a better chance than niche ones (?).
Moreover, the general mass isn’t so aware of sports products – after all, how many of us really care about the fact that different sporting activities require different type of shoes/accessories.
In short, eSportsBuy (and other companies in this space) need to increase the awareness of the category itself and build authority – that’s what will matter in the long run. That’s what Flipkart is (still) trying to do (with recently TV campaigns).
What’s your take on sports related ecommerce category?
Here is a quick snapshot of eSportsBuy:
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Company Founding Date
25/03/2011
Founding team/work experience
Prateek Agarwal (Co-founder): BTech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. Has previously worked at firms like Nvidia, IBM, Amazon, etc. The person behind the technology at eSportsBuy.com
Amit Monga (Co-founder): BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi. Has prior experience in the operations, analytics and consulting in firms like Diamond Management & Technology Consulting, etc. The person behind the operations and the customer smiles at eSportsBuy.com
Megha Bhatia: Aircraft Maintenance Engineering from Indian Institute of Aeronautics. Has worked as an In-Flight-Manager at Indigo before coming to eSportsBuy.com. The person behind the online marketing efforts at the company.
What (and Whose) Problem Are you Solving?
People are getting more and more cautious about their health now, thus having an increasing need of quality sports & fitness products, but don’t find a good option online. eSportsBuy.com aims to become a online store dedicated to serve all their needs related to sports & fitness, along with prompt customer service leading to high customer satisfaction. We are an online store where anyone can order, but our target customer segment mainly includes semi-professional and professional sports players, health and body-building enthusiasts, middle to high income households, corporates and sports clubs throughout the country.
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Similar Startup in this space: PlayGroundOnline.
