Our first client. Our first Fortune 500 company. Our first award. As commercetools continues to grow and strengthen, we keep adding more and more momentous firsts to our roster. And here’s the latest one: we’ve scored a partnership with JSW One – our very first company in India.
JSW One is a new business initiative from JSW Group – a titanic Indian conglomerate based in Mumbai, with core sectors in steel, energy, cement and infrastructure – that will combine the distribution and supply chains of JSW Group’s steel, cement and paint businesses. Through doing so, JSW One will provide a comprehensive, “one-stop-online-shop” for their customers by merging products throughout JSW Group’s various portfolios
For a project of this magnitude, the commerce solution needed to be bespoke but with a powerful foundation to easily scale up with the business and be flexible enough to sell a variety of products with complex attributes. To JSW One, commercetools offered everything they were looking for, and thus, we’ve now penetrated a brand-new market by earning our first ever partnership with an Indian company, which is incredibly exciting for our growth in the region.
Territory Director APAC, commercetools
eCommerce and India
eCommerce didn’t exactly have an enthusiastic start in India. Indian companies were slow to adopt this new commerce channel and Indian shoppers didn’t show a lot of appreciation for the ability to make their purchases online due to lack of familiarity and trust. It wasn’t until 2014, when the Government of India developed several programs to support and promote the growth of eCommerce in the country, that eCommerce really began to take off – and take off it has. Over the past few years, online shopping in India has shot up exponentially, with both B2B and B2C Indian shoppers embracing the convenience of purchasing items straight from their devices and Indian businesses having access to the infrastructure that can build modern commerce experiences.
According to this study, the Indian eCommerce market was worth USD $38.5 billion in 2017 and is expected to jump up to USD $200 billion by 2026. This upward growth trajectory will continue outpacing other countries and is expected to surpass even the US to become the second largest eCommerce market in the world by 2034. India’s eCommerce boom is thanks to a huge increase in smartphone ownership, more 4G coverage and growing consumer wealth. With most of the country willing to spend their Rupees online for business and personal purchases, there is no better time for enterprises to expand their commerce solutions to the digital world.
In other words, JSW Group is perfectly primed for success in regard to introducing their B2B online commerce solution, under JSW One, to their Indian consumers.
commercetools’ grand entrance into India
When the business leaders at JSW Group first envisioned JSW One’s B2B online commerce platform, they knew they needed a vendor that would meet their business needs in terms of sheer magnitude. Afterall, India is home to 17.7% of the world’s population and an incredibly large market – and JSW One plans to sell their wares all over the country. They require a solution that can scale up as they grow and keep pace with their business progress.
JSW One’s online shop is poised to sell thousands of steel products in countless configurations by weight, grade and length. Given that steel orders can vary wildly in terms of such specifications, it is imperative that their commerce platform can be flexible and customizable enough to handle such intricate product features, as well as model and pricing structures. Luckily, flexibility, customization and scalability is in commercetools’ DNA, so we can easily rise to meet the requirements JSW One needs to excel in the commerce space.
CEO and Co-Founder, commercetools
So how did JSW Group and commercetools connect in the first place? It was actually JSW Groups’ professional services provider, Ernst & Young, who suggested going with commercetools (it seems our reputation precedes us). Looking into our technological capabilities was enough to convince JSW Group that commercetools was everything they needed, and so a partnership was formed between us and the Indian mega-enterprise in October 2020. In collaboration with Ernst & Young and Royal Cyber, JSW One is now prepping to launch their pilot project in 2021, with commercetools fueling their B2B commerce platform.
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