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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

The pioneer of Indian e-commerce

ST Team
Thursday, October 6, 2011
ST Team
The title of the father of e-commerce in India sits lightly on K Vaitheeswaran, the entrepreneur who founded Indiaplaza, India’s first online shopping company in 1999 and since then has been single-handedly championing the cause of the Indian e-commerce industry.

Today when there is a new founded enthusiasm on e-commerce and everyone from bright-eyed entrepreneurs to over excited investors are going ga-ga over online shopping, Vaithee (as he is popularly known to everyone) is satisfied with a “I knew this all along” gleam in his eye.

Ask him what is unique about Indiaplaza and he says ‘It is the only Indian online shopping company to have been in business since the last millennium!”

Ask him further whether being referred to as the “father of Indian e-commerce” makes him feel old and his response is: “The best way to gain respect and credibility in any industry is to spend a lot of time in that area and also grow old. I have managed both successfully. Interestingly, we are in a business that is primarily targeted at the younger audience so the trick is to think like them.”

Vaithee fell in love with the web in general and e-commerce in particular in 1996. He was at that time working on an internal project in Wipro and someone told him to log on to the internet to get some information. Within 24 hours of his first foray on the web, Vaithee was hooked and one of his unforgettable experiences was clicking on a banner ad on Yahoo! for a company called amazon.com which was selling books online. So, when he got a chance to co-found Fabmart.com – India’s first online shopping company he threw all caution to the winds and jumped at it.


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