Distribution Opportunities in India

Selling, arguably, is the most important function in any business. However good its product - survival and growth of business depends greatly on sales performance. Distribution channel plays a critical function in success of sales strategy. Its extremely important for any entrepreneur to understand how distribution channels work in India and more importantly, how to build distribution channel at low cost and within short time frame. First the Good News - with introduction of GST from July 2017 India has become truly a single market and consequently building distribution channel has become easier, far less expensive and within reach of even small-scale manufacturers. Prior to GST India was, in effect, a collection of local, state-wise markets each having its own VAT rates, entry tax, octroi and sundry other taxation and compliance barriers. Selling across India was tedious, cumbersome and expensive because complying with CST, VAT, warehousing requirements and maze of ...

Still selling in local markets only ? Why not sell across India through distributors and dealers ? If your product is selling good in local market, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t sell elsewhere. All you need to do is to build distribution channels in target markets and nurture them for year round sales. Here's a step-by-step plan for you to do so.   Step 1 :   Make Your Product Distribution Ready You know how good your product is or how profitable could it be for resellers. However, potential distribution partners are not aware about it.   So, we create a distribution catalog for your products that provides distribution related information. The catalog has unique features like private/public properties where you may prefer to disclose certain information (e.g. distributor commission) only to private parties while other information could be public. Step 2 : Create Awareness Next step is to attract distribution partners towards your product by...

If 10 Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) are asked what's the greatest challenge they face - chances are 9 of them would say 'how to sell more'. SMEs in India face myriad challenges - non-availability of bank credit, govt regulations, deficient infrastructure, lack of productivity etc. - but they are brave and capable enough to face all these. However, one area that SMEs are consistently failing is to sell more and consequently lack of growth - leading to what is popularly called 'Missing Middle Syndrome' - SMEs are not evolving to become mid-sized enterprises for many years. With introduction of GST, a great opportunity opens up for SMEs to sell across India as hassles of inter-state trade is set to go from July 1. But how SMEs can make use of this opportunity without access to distribution channels ? SMEs do not have financial resources to open sales and distribution centers across India - even very large companies like Hindustan Unilever or Nest...

Indian B2B E-Commerce marketplaces are going through difficult times. Started with lots of fanfare and positive expert predictions – they got everything right during initial days. A huge market, virtually no competition, excellent fund flow, ready offline market waiting to be disrupted – but somehow the smooth sailing has run into choppy waters. The largest Indian B2B e-commerce marketplace having ample VC money has closed down, leaving over 500 professionals jobless. Many smaller ones are either closed or in the process of shutting down. What's happening ? Let’s share our experience. BazarA2Z is one of the first to get into B2B E-commerce bandwagon. Being in online B2B market for long - it was comparatively easy for us to develop B2B e-commerce marketplace with unique offline-like features like automatic volume based discounting, pre-sale negotiation, lot-based trading, detail spec comparison among vendors, online credit etc. We accepted only manufacturers a...