More information has emerged about Etsy India and its dedicated efforts to make a foray into one of the most competitive ecommerce environments. As we reported last month, the crafts marketplace has opened up an office in Delhi and has established a dedicated team in country: Etsy crafts marketplace looks to India for future growth.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the great wealth of vibrant product sourcing opportunities in India, they have confirmed they will be concentrating efforts of seller recruitment in India and who can then focus on making their goods available to shoppers in other key Etsy target areas like the Americas and Europe. As the new head of Etsy India says:
India is an interesting market for us, we have always had a lot of sellers and buyers from India. Now, with the growth in e-commerce, we are seeing a lot of creative entrepreneurs come online on Etsy and do very well. So we decided that it is the right time to get here and have a presence. Our focus is on the seller side, but buyer opportunity exists, too. Especially because India is a big e-commerce market and we will be looking at those opportunities of the various things we can do. Our teams are also physically going to local bazaars or looking at the online database to find interesting products.
– Himanshu Wardhan, Managing Director India, Etsy
There’s huge potential for growth: of the 50 million product listings available on Etsy, they say that just 650,000 are from India sellers. But they also say that searches for and interest in Indian goods is growing.
What will be interesting to see is how Etsy tackles the increasingly protectionist approach that India is demanding from companies based overseas. Regulations requiring firms to hold information locally, in particular, are a headache and expense for any organisation that operates on a multi-national basis.
