EBay Helps Snapdeal, an EBay Wannabe in India

Shilpa Gupta and her colleagues have caught the online shopping bug. Each morning the human resources staffers for an Indian newspaper try to guess whose purchases will arrive that day. Increasingly, their packages arrive from Snapdeal.com, one of India’s fastest-growing e-commerce sites. The three-year-old startup has caught the attention of EBay, which recently led a group that invested $50 million in the 1,000-employee New Delhi company.

Snapdeal operates as an online marketplace for about 10,000 small merchants, most with little tech experience, that rely on their host for help with shipping and billing. That sets it apart from India’s leading e-commerce site, FlipKart, which stocks and sells its own inventory and whose revenues topped $100 million in 2012, according to consulting firm Technopak. Snapdeal Chief Executive Officer Kunal Bahl says his site has 20 million registered users and gets a million visitors a day.