Ameen KhwajaCEO & Founder of LatestOne.com Published On: Wednesday, March 02, 2016 Views 3219

“Business only has two functions - Marketing & Innovation.”

With over 200 employees, Mr. Ameen Khwaja is a true source of inspiration for his team. An engineer from Bharati Vidyapeeth, Mr. Khwaja started his career as a sales manager. He always had a knack for intelligence and analytics, which eventually led him down the path of digital marketing and finally, as the CEO of his own startup, LatestOne.com.

LatestOne.com is based in Hyderabad and is India’s only e-tailer, which specializes in tech and mobile accessories. It sells a broad range on accessories such as mobile covers, tablet accessories, cables, power banks, Android TVs, headsets, smart watches, and more. LatestOne.com houses over 10,000 SKU in its two warehouses based in Hyderabad and New Delhi.

Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.

Founded in October 2014, Hyderabad based LatestOne.com is India’s only e-tailer specialized in tech and mobile accessories. Be it Bluetooth devices, mobile covers, tablet accessories, cables, power banks, Android TVs, headsets, smart watches or CCTV’s, it stocks over 10,000 different products in its inventory and operates through its own warehouses.

What inspired you to build the above product/ service?

I researched on the potential of on-line mobile and computer accessories market and discovered its value of Rs.3000 crores for the year 2012. Then my ideas started shaping up in an incubation center along with Mr. Palem Srikanth Reddy. We decided to explore into on-line mobile and computer accessories owing to the market size and growth opportunity, as there was no other specialized e-commerce player in mobile and tech accessories niche vertical by then.

What was the most challenging part of your journey till now?

The most challenging parts were to increase per day orders from 100 to 4000 and to provide excellent online shopping experience to our customers. We worked hard to make sure that LatestOne.com website performance is up to the mark in terms of speed on 2G network. We will continue to focus on website performance and to increase orders to 5000 plus.

How did you overcome those challenges?

We have a team of highly motivated, result oriented digital marketing and IT professionals. For increasing orders we worked on multiple digital marketing platforms. In my opinion dependency on single platform to get traffic is not a healthy situation. We have recently enabled TTFR (Time to First Render), an application that enables us to target our customers better. Currently, 85-87 per cent of our visitors access our portal using mobile devices. When a consumer logs in to our website through a mobile, our website becomes mobile-friendly and downloads only limited data. It changes according to the size of the consumer’s phone screen. It also changes according to the speed of the customer’s mobile network connection. This has helped us achieve 30 per cent more visitor conversion.

Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now.

LatestOne.com, is receiving additional funding of Rs 20 crores from its existing investor, Palred Technologies Limited (PTL), bringing in a total investment of Rs. 50 crores. PTL has already raised Rs 9 crores through preferential share allotment to non-promoter investors, Koh Boon Hwee – Ex-Chairman Singapore Telecom, Singapore Airlines, Passage to India Master Fund and Ashish Dhawan – Founder Chrys Capital. The Board and Shareholders of PTL have already approved additional investment of Rs 25 crores into their e-Commerce subsidiaries.

According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?

Adaptability, perseverance & patience

Share any one habit which you think makes you more productive.

Deadlines

What are your plans for next 3 years?

In next 3 years we target to achieve INR 500 crores revenue.

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