The Indian e-commerce industry is all set to record to be the 3rd highest in terms of growth rate in Asia-Pacific this 2018, as more and more young people in the country switch to using smartphones and make online purchases, thanks to the internet services being made at affordable rates.
The automotive spare parts for cars is largely unorganised and is mainly controlled by OEMS and aftermarket players. Online sales of auto spare parts for cars still remains a challenged and is largely under-tapped in India.
Autosarena team discusses with Mr. Yevgen Sokolnikov, CEO & Co-founder, Boodmo, how they plan to solve this challenge.
Boodmo is an online marketplace for vehicle spare parts that facilitates the sale of automobile components from vendors to customers. The enterprise aims to organize and standardize the Indian automobile spare parts market and make it more dynamic and transparent for all the stakeholders.
boodmo is the brainchild of two Ukrainian entrepreneurs – Mr. Oleksandr Danylenko (Co-Founder & Director of Operations and Finance) and Mr. Yevgen Sokolnikov (CEO & Co-Founder). Although it was established in August 2015, the website started the sale of car spare parts in January 2017.
The company has witnessed a tremendous customer response and served more than 7,000 customers in the very first year of sales operations. In a short span, boodmo has collated a massive e-repository of genuine OEM and aftermarket car spare parts, offering over 1 million varieties of spares by 400 suppliers of over 3,000 Indian as well as international brands.
The following responses have been given by Mr. Yevgen Sokolnikov, Co-Founder & CEO, boodmo.com
1. Please tell us about your company and how did the idea of boodmo come up?
While researching international auto markets, Oleksandr and I were intrigued with the prospective growth of Indian market and particularly in this sector. However, we saw that the country’s automobile spare parts market was highly defragmented and unorganized. This prompted us to create boodmo.com as an online vehicle spare parts marketplace that facilitates the sale of automobile components from vendors to customers. Our enterprise aims to organize and standardize the Indian automobile spare parts market and make it more dynamic and transparent for all the stakeholders.
2. How different are you from the rest competitors?
Given that India’s online automobile spare parts market is still in the nascent stage, there are hardly any signs of competition in boodmo’s sphere of business. Yet, we are aiming at international service delivery standards and have therefore developed several customer-centric policies that set us apart from our available competition in the online space as well as our real competition, the offline auto-parts stores.
We are honest; our aim is to develop Indian online spare parts market by inducing trust, credibility and transparency in our service, instead of amassing profits and customers by selective pricing. We are reliable; we personally cross-check all the products we deliver through vendors at our Sorting Hub. We are authentic; boodmo guarantees 100% genuine spare parts. We have a quality-check process that outlines the products with damage or quality issues. Wetake absolute accountability for all the products sold through our portal. If a buyer is somehow delivered defective or damaged product(s) or doesn’t need the part anymore for any reason, he/she can return product within 10 days of the date of delivery.
3. How will Boodmo help users?
boodmo combining inventory of hundreds of vendors offers the widest assortment of spare parts on market. Our web portal provides identification and sale of appropriate products through the Part Number, to ensure that required parts are delivered to the customers. We care about products quality and origin delivered to the customer in the first place and accepts return in case of any doubt.
We have also developed a ‘Spare Parts Catalogue’ for the company website. This catalogue is a vast database with a comprehensive list of spare parts available in the market. It enables buyers as well as sellers to identify the exact parts and their corresponding part number by surfing through the vehicle’s manufacturer, make and year of manufacturing. This helps them in shortlisting the exact product that would fit their vehicle.
4. Your view of the Indian automotive aftermarket?
The automotive market in India is continuously growing in double digits and that augurs well for the aftermarket. While the overseas auto aftermarkets are already mature, having a set of credible and organized players, Indian aftermarket is still dominated by traditional and unorganized businesses. The Indian auto-spares consumers are still in the maturing phase and are apprehensive about taking the online route to buy spare parts. This is precisely the reason that encouraged us further to set up a business in India. We understand that our endeavours can bring value to the aftermarket here.
5. The Indian automotive aftermarket is very unorganized and is close guarded by OEMs, how do you plan to tackle this?
Online business is way too small to influence the way how the industry operates. Main auto manufacturers are not interested in new sales channels due to their stable performance on market. Though few OEMs even launched their own online shops, it is obviously outside of their focus and presumably, it was done mostly for Competition Commission rather than for customers.
We see interest from a market in contemporary tools – catalogues and online sales portal. And we believe that gradually, together with other e-commerce websites – our colleagues, not competitors, we will grow the online aftermarket to a significant size what definitely will benefit spare parts users.
6. How will you ensure that the parts provided are genuine, as the counterfeit market is almost 3 times the size?
boodmo.com takes full responsibility of providing absolutely genuine parts to its customers. We had never delivered even 1 counterfeit product. We banned a few vendors for offering products of doubtful quality. Gradually, we started collecting and monitoring all products at our Sorting Hub in Delhi, where they undergo a quality check and are re-packed before going out for delivery. This has enabled us to provide 100% guarantee on the genuinity of parts sold through our portal. To fasten the delivery process, we are aiming to build more sorting hubs in all regions of the country; with one hub in Jaipur already in the final phases of being fully operational.
7. Does Boodmo support local garages? And do they have any preferred partners?
As of now boodmo is focusing on solving one but the biggest problem – sourcing the spare parts. There are a plenty of start-upsconnecting drivers with garages and we are not going to stretch ourselves to this area, we have a lot of work in our niche.
8. Will parts from different suppliers be compared? Eg. A wiper blade can be bought from the OEM, from supplier A and Supplier B, will one get to compare the prices and specs?
One of the unique features of boodmo portal is the availability of information on substitutes – similar parts produced by other brands.
boodmo does not allow to compare parts because if they are applicable for the same car they share absolutely same technical characteristics and size. The only difference between parts from different brands will be in quality and price.
We are sharing a short description of the brand and all prices, thus customer is free to choose between analogues.
9. How are you sourcing the parts? Are they linked to the part no or VIN code of a vehicle?
Boodmo sources spare parts from many vendors from across the country.If the vendor is offering only genuine products, provides GST invoices and agree to update its data regularly he is entitled to sell products on boodmo.
We are very serious with the uniqueness of products in our database; it means we create a part number only if it exists in catalogue provided by manufacturers. Vendors are not allowed to create any part numbers on boodmo, their products can be only matched to existing checked part numbers.
Yes, all of our parts are sourced and arranged according to their corresponding make, manufacturer, and part number. VIN identification facility is available for part-makers which disclose their VIN database in the public domain.
10. How is the VIN data sourced?
VIN number is just a coded information about the car. There is no secret what is hidden in it. (https://boodmo.com/pages/article/whatdothosedigitsinyourvinnumbermeans/). The more difficult part of how to identify correct part which applies to exactly your car. Except for manually assembled specimens, modern cars are manufactured in batches which define the set of parts used in cars. For example, in catalogues, you can find a remark like “applicable from 3564 to 8533” pointing to cars with those serial numbers shown in VIN. Our task is to simplify the process of parts identification for boodmo visitors.
11. How is the response from Indian market, what is the number of transactions and its total value?
We received an unimaginably tremendous response in the very first year of sales operations. Currently, we are receiving 200-250orders every day and 5.5L unique portal visitors per month. In total we served 10,000 customers, 40% of them returned for a second purchase.
12. What is the vision for boodmo?
The Indian automobile service industry is growing at a momentous pace. And we are going to be the number one online destination for spare parts. We are guided by the vision to make this industry more organized, in line with international standards, so that people could find the best-suited automobile parts with just a few clicks of the mouse.
13. Tips for our readers
Nowadays, the internet allows unprecedented opportunity to find interested information, compare and get delivered whatever you like with minimum efforts. And such specific products like spare parts are not exclusion anymore.
Regarding spare parts, try to avoid used or badly packaged one. Feel free to use products from aftermarket brands who invest in aan dvertisement, in most cases ,they offer decent quality at ca ompetitive price.
