IndiaMART-The Evolving B2B Marketplace

IndiaMART was started in 1996 by Dinesh Agarwal and Brijesh Agrawal in New Delhi, India. At that time, IndiaMART was like a B2B website that provided information pertaining to exporters and suppliers, thereby serving as a business directory. The company then decided to start an e-marketplace, where sellers and buyers could interact and do business. The company realized that buyers would be attracted to its website if it had a large database of sellers. Hence, to build the database, it offered ‘free listing with free query forwarding’ to the sellers. IndiaMART took on the onus of forwarding the queries it got from buyers to suppliers by post, fax, phone, and email..