1990’s was unlike the grand old times, far away from the incremental changes the past few decades had seen. A phenomenon so strong was taking shape and grabbing the eye of entire world. Any guesses for the phenomenon? It is so common today that we cannot imagine a day without it. So ubiquitous that we take it for granted that every person you talk to has a facebook account, watsapp account or at least has an email address which he/she checks every now and then. Yes, the phenomenon, the era I am talking about is “The internet era”. So was the influence of this phenomenon that projected annual web-commerce growth rate was estimated at 2300%. It is this growth potential that led to the inception of Cadabra Inc. in the summers of 1994. Cadabra Inc. then, is one of the worlds largest e-commerce companies today. The company embarked on the journey of bringing books to anyone and everyone who intended to read. With the offered choice selection so vast that the people who previously had only a few hundred books to choose from (in state libraries and the local book stores), now had a problem of plenty with an option of choosing from tens of thousands of books (from all times, of all kinds). Such was a frenzy, that in the first 30 days of launch, Cadabra Inc. had orders from all 50 US states and from 45 different countries. Started with a few thousand dollars seed money from the founder’s parents, it was more a leap of faith in their son than a profit motivation. A company that was sued multiple times in the later 1990’s for its claim of being the largest bookstore, is today beyond the reach of the plaintiffs in the same segment. Today not only does it sell books, it cross-sells electronics with the apt books(manuals) on how to use that electronic device; Informs customers of what they may also like based on their past buying history, their half baked carts, their click through rate etc. 
If you want to see a perfect example of Vertical Integration, Amazon (formerly known as Cadabra Inc.) would be the one. Entering into the market through Kindle, an e-ink device which enables users to read e-books they buy from Amazon.com, shows how the company did forward integration by removing the dependency on any other hardware device (Sony LIBRIes, world’s first e-ink device) for its e-books. Amazon further widened its value chain by then backward integrating and getting publishing rights, thus becoming a publisher-seller from just being a seller previously. Amazon Web-Service (AWS) deserves another post so let’s not even go there right now.
Amazon’s $74 bilion revenue, its scale and sheer experience makes it a behemoth task for its competitors to catch-up with the company. Amazon’s recent try to throttle the Chinese market (dominated by the local Alibaba.com), has not been a journey void of bumps. However, it has sent ripples in another Asian market, by its entry in India in 2013, known to be one of the toughest markets owing to its diverse demography. Indian market though currently dominated by its largest e-tailer Flipkart (often referred to as “Amazon of India”), is set to become the largest growing e-commerce market by 2016. To survive the Amazon scare, local players are on the path of consolidation (Flipkart-Myntra merger, Flipkart-Letsbuy) and have also tightened their seat belts by offering lucrative services such as one-day delivery in many cities.
It is now not just a “Price-War”, it is a war between Indian e-commerce titans and the world’s most experienced e-commerce store, Amazon.com!
My take, My voice. 