Genie Sports: Ruling & Organizing the Sports & Fitness e-Commerce Industry Date:   Friday , January 30, 2015 Owing to the recent surge in sports activities including IPL, Pro Kabaddi League, IHL and others, India is becoming \'Nation of League\' and the sports product market here is witnessing a hockey stick growth. But the challenge still lies in accessing right equipments within the budget. Smoothening this beltway for all the sports lover is Genie Sports, a dedicated sports & fitness e-Commerce company offering back end processing capability for companies having their virtual retail points or e-Commerce websites. Established in December 2011, the company made a quantum jump and created a brand persona among the buyers as one of the finest e-Commerce company where one can easily find their sports equipment from their loved brand. To create a niche in the sports e-Commerce space, Meerut based Genie Sports has created a different brand identity called SporteGenie to offer \'Best Brands at Best Prices\' across pan India. SporteGenie is the front end of the company through with they operate directly in e-Commerce. Today, SporteGenie become one of the most acknowledged names among various e-Commerce companies who identify the company as a great e-Commerce aggregator as well as e-Commerce partner. \"We have collaborated with huge number of brands to offer best brand at best prices. In next couple of months, many regional brands will also be on our portal which will give access to the customers to choose from national and regional brands,\" says Harsh Mahajan, Co-Founder & CEO, Genie Sports Pvt. Ltd. The company segregates their clients based on 3P model � People, Product & Price. They work concurrently on both B2B and B2C models where the B2B business relies on other marketing platforms which generate primary revenues for Genie Sports. \"We understand the sellers\' needs like what are the brands they look for and at what price points, what are the customer behavior metrics they put in place to understand it and others. After analyzing these factors, we generate product catalogs and price points at which they can sell the products,\" adds Harsh. Today, the company proudly boasts of some of the popular sports brand equipments available on their website including Cosco, Head, Yonex, GKI, SM, Kanton, Donic amongst others which together takes the count of products available on the website to over 8,000. The Journey Before incepting Genie Sports in 2011, Harsh analyzed and researched the market just to find that sports & fitness domain was one of the most unorganized sector. He realized that not only are people facing difficulty in finding their favored sports brands at the most reasonable price, but sports & fitness brands too were facing difficulties in catering the market through Indian e-Commerce industry as they were witnessing huge bottlenecks which are often driven by weak distribution networks. The company is constantly on their toes to increase their catalog to help build an organized brand which is available at both offline stores as well as online portals without any conflict with their customers. On the other hand, SporteGenie is also serving the users via various marketing platforms which helps them reach tier-2 and tier-3 cities. \"As an e-Commerce company, we want to stick to 3P USP only and decided to launch our own private label \'Prokyde\' positioned for both our business clients as well as end customers. The product was launched exclusively on Flipkart around a month ago,\" asserts Harsh. Genie Sports private label Prokyde offers products which are required by Indian masses and are good in quality while fitting the pockets of the buyers. Customer Satisfaction � The Cherry on the Cake Whether it is cost or quality of the product or delivery or post-delivery experience, we have been noticing huge fiascos among the e-Commerce buyers. \"Customer\'s pleasure is shattered as soon as he receives wrong/damaged product. To be honest, we broke good amount of badminton rackets when we started, as Yonex rackets have delicate carbon/graphite shaft. Later, we designed special corrugated boxes and tweaked normal shipment packing process so that it fits our product catalog,\" adds Harsh. Today damaged shipment count less than 0.5 percent which results due to bad manhandling by logistics partners. Genie Sports has partnered with Unicommerce for Order Management pertaining to which, the wrong shipment count has come down to just a mere 0.2 percent which occurs due to human error. Thus, the brand\'s core pillars lies in their fast shipment and faster & correct delivery. Harsh further adds, \"Good technical solutions removes our order management hindrances and generations old knowledge of the industry of the promoters takes care of product development and price management which has helped us to offer complete customer satisfaction\". Genie Sports uses email marketing heavily to reach out to their potential customers which has generated around 30 percent RoI for the company in comparison to Facebook and Google Ads. But the company very well understand that social media has an upper-hand when it comes to spreading awareness. Thus, the company profoundly uses social media platform to spread the word of their upcoming brands/products. However, the current challenge for not just Genie Sports but for the entire sports & fitness industry is its very unorganized nature. \"Sports & fitness brands lack bar coding, size marking, color marking, and design marking which makes inventory management a big challenge. Also, several brands don\'t have good quality high resolution images which make it even more difficult to manage these brands,\" explains Harsh. But with gradual alignment and organizing process of the industry, the company has taken strides over their products shipping time. Initially, the company took around 24-36 hours to ship products, but today they ship the products in 2-6 hours for nearly 77 percent of their orders which are generated. In their short journey of two years, the company have already cleared several holdups and have aligned their vision with that of the industry needs. While this is just the beginning for Genie Sports as the sports & fitness industry has just opened their doors for e-Commerce, being one of the early entrants in the space will surely leverage Genie Sports in the coming days. Panel Key Management Harsh Mahajan, Co-Founder & CEO Harsh has over half a decade of experience working in various domains. Prior to founding Genie Sports, he founded Tech Fanas, a new eReader channel catering various users of cloud computing, mobile, gaming and others. Offices: Meerut (Headquarter) and Noida