The site has identified its focus area as academic and professional groups in the 18-25 age group, and it hopes the bonds built on the campus will have a spill-over effect on the 35 plus age group also. Students and professionals constitute 70 per cent of the country's book market. With 13 lakh new students joining academic streams every year, this is a captive market with great potential.

Says G B S Bindra, managing director, firstandsecond.com,``We offer competitive prices, innovative payment systems, quick delivery and value-added e-mail services. We will begin with a distribution network in 26 cities initially, which will be extended to 126 locations.'' The company has tied up with book publishers and launched innovative promotional alliances with high traffic general business and education sites like indiainfoline, egurucool, gutterspace and zeelearn, to create a multiple visibility cross promotion platform. ``We intend to have at least 20 alliances by the end of the year with vertical portals in every category like IT, education, entertainment, finance.'' The company hopes to garner over Rs 50 crore from each alliance.

In a move to make payment modes as simple as possible and cut down dependence on credit cards, it accepts local cheques and has set up 325 drop boxes at various locations across 40 cities. ``We have streamlined our logistics so that it takes one-three days to deliver books after a cheque is cashed, and up to 14 days for a foreign delivery,'' says Bindra.With orders coming in from smaller cities like Rourkela and Karnal, the company is drawing up plans to make its presence felt in smaller towns also. Here it plans to set up drop boxes at cyber cafes and offer special promotions to attract more orders. It will also tie-up with bookshops to bundle orders and offer special discounts of up to 25-30 per cent.

The online bookstore has one million titles online, with most titles priced at least 20 per cent cheaper and discounts of up to 40 per cent on special books, which include titles from the US, UK and Indian market. The books range from medicine, engineering, architecture and law, to business, management, mathematics and computers. The company has three warehouses in Delhi, the US and the UK. It has sold 16,000 books since its launch in May.

In an effort to popularise the concept of e-commerce, it has been offering special promos - recently it offered free copies of the Guinness book of world records, priced at Rs 350. It received 40,000 orders, of which 5,000 were selected through a draw. It will work on similar promos through the year.

Firstand scond.com is targeting sales of Rs 7 crore this year, Rs 15 crore in the second year and Rs 65 crore in the third year. The online bookstore is an initiative of eFirst Solutions India Pvt Ltd, set up with a UK-based angel investor's funding of $5 million. It is now looking for a second round of VC funding.