Building B2B Commerce

To an onlooker, B2C Commerce was built through discounting, ad-led visibility, innovations like payment on delivery, and great last mile logistics. And a lot of capital.

B2B Commerce, though, is a different animal. In 3 ways, and they have to be solved concurrently –

1. Credit is both a challenge and an opportunity. B2B is entirely credit reliant, and if solved, money and scale can be made there. Our solution was to build our own NBFC to facilitate B2B commerce, not just for us but others too.
2. Eventual margins will be thin. Hence, you can’t say that you will burn your way through and at scale, you will start recovering from the early years’ burn. One has to be profit-minded from the start. We turned PAT +ve in our 3rd year of operations in commerce, largely through discipline, cost focus, and process control.
3. While the B2B buyer can be engaged with tech, it is hard to acquire him with a tech-only approach. An on-field sales force is needed; and they have to break into an existing supplier relationship. Not easy. Needs persistence and drive. We solved it by building our sales engine with campus freshmen, armed with a desire to change the world.

But the time for B2B commerce has arrived. And it will not just take capital, but our answers to the above 3!