autojunction, the automobile e-commerce business unit of mjunction services, is looking at getting into the supply side of vehicles on behalf of its clients.

autojunction, at present, is into finding potential buyers for its clients and helping the latter sell off their repossessed cars on the internet through a bidding process.

"Our clients are essentially bankers who give loans to buyers. As of now we were only a platform who would help banks identify potential buyers and sell their repossessed cars.

But because some of the banks have requested us to manage the supply side of it too, we wish to get the logistics part of the vehicle buying-selling process from July this year," said Viresh Oberoi, managing director of mjunction.

The company, with its expertise in supply chain management for steel, feels managing the logistics for vehicles would be simple enough.

autojunction, set up in June 2006, sold 1800 vehicles in 9 months and hopes to sell 11,000 this financial year.

The company also plans to sell new and pre-owned cars on behalf of its clients.

"Right now the demand for new and pre-owned vehicles is more or less equal. But this is soon expected to be in the range of 1:3 which means for sale of every new vehicle, there would be sale of three second hand cars. We therefore plan to offer sales of pre-owned vehicles also in our portal," informed Oberoi.

The company is also planning to introduce the online Global earnest money deposit (EMD) Management System for its clients.

We often see a lot of buyers simply playing through the bidding process without any actual intentions of buying. To avoid such bidder- backout, we would introduce a system wherein every bidder would have to deposit Rs 10,000 in the bank's name. This money would be refundable or adjustable during the final purchase," informed Soumen Bhattacharya, AGM &head of autojunction.

The company is also investing heavily in buyer education in order to pitch the portal's competence and convenience.

"Most of our buyers are garage owners and fleet operators. We therefore have employees who are on the field all the time recognising and educating potential buyers the benefit of e-commerce and the kind of clarity we offer," Oberoi added.

The company is also running a call-centre with ten employees.

It expects e-commerce to fetch revenues in tune of Rs. 300 crore this financial year. In the last nine months of its operations, it has managed a turnover of Rs 30 crore.

Source: http://www.business-standard.com/search/storypage_new.php?leftnm=lmnu1&leftindx=1&lselect=1&autono=289947