About Hifunda Vijay Jain - founder of Hifunda, has been a computer & Internet savvy person and has been associated with import for a very long time.

Since the last several years he has been associated with many Internet based International trade associations which had given him a lot of exposure in the field of his Import & Export Business.

Vijay Jain has widely traveled around the globe and much of his business contacts were through the association of these Internet Trade associations.

During the course of his many business tours abroad and nationally, it was felt that such internet based association be built whereby people could interact and post their enquiries for both buying and selling of products. He also felt that there were many misconceptions among the South Asian countries and about India and its potential to supply. The buyer’s abroad could not locate Indian suppliers and Sellers here could not locate foreign buyers.

With this focus in mind, he planned to develop a business site where we could provide a forum for the business community to do business online.

Planning on
Hifunda The development of this site began as a purely business site - "Buy-Sell" and then began the growth of E-Commerce which had tremendous future thus the foray into E-Commerce. The process of adding more and more Powerful sites like Auction, Barter, Matrimonial, Real Estate, Education, Travels etc to build the site as a world class informative site. Not missing out on the younger generation, many features were added for them too.
We also wanted to be a one-stop site for the Indian surfer. Inorder to achieve this objective we simply built the site applications, content structure and deliverables around the mission objective. We quantified the offerings keeping the requirement psyche of the Indian surfer. Once we got thinking like him/her, the ideas just flowed and then it was just a matter of translating them into technology.

Shopping Mall "We studied the various online shopping sites and we saw there was no such site as a true SHOPPING MALL and basically most of them were either small web sites selling their products or selling as a Departmental Store concept where, they outsource all their products and sell on their Shops. We zeroed onto this module where the focus was on the individual shop owners. As in a physical Mall, this Hifunda Shopping Mall intends to provide the basic infrastructure - like the Hardware & Software, Online connectivity, Logistic support, Payment processing through our Shopping Mall Credit Card Merchant a/c. Dynamic Payment processing etc. and each Shop owner will be supporting their Online Shop with their Physical Shop. It will be like getting an opportunity to use it as an International Shop for the World at Large."

Development of site We used end to end IBM technology to achieve this IBM’s e-business tools such as Net.Commerce was used for the shopping mall and for the security aspect, IBM E-Network Firewall was used. One of the main reasons why we decided on IBM technology was they were the only vendors who had a clear roadmap and suite offering to achieve the task. Web Development took care of the implementation and deployment of the site

Comparison to existing
Sites / portals At Hifunda’s core its ASP (Application Service Provider) functionality. The site provides very complex applications such as the barter, auction, webmail, chat, currency converter etc. to its users. To our knowledge the site is unparalleled in the Asia pacific region in the variety of web based services it offers.

Investment "Design and development of a Web Portal of this size and magnitude requires huge initial investment. With E-Commerce added to the same, the investment is even huge. Since the project is still not fully complete, the total investment cannot be quantified. "

"Now with the formal launch, besides the normal task of providing and adding more and more utility to the growth of the site and building it into an International brand, now the effort will be more on marketing & brand building exercise. We have already taken the first step today and will continue to build this with even more vigour. Though we have used the latest technologies - both Hardware and Software, as and when need increases, we will also be upgrading the technology to meet the growing needs"
"As such, it is very difficult to quantify the investment at this moment. Till the whole project is implemented and completed."
Future Plans "Hifunda has been developed keeping in mind future expansion needs and accordingly there are enough options for expansion. Major inputs to the site have been planned some, of them are listed below."