The portal essentially works as an enabler of supply chain management solutions for small and medium-sized businesses through technological support.

It sees a huge potential for products like handicrafts and jewellery that hold nostalgic value for Indians away from home. NRI needs for speciality Indian goods - specially handicrafts - has been identified as a need gap and it hopes to garner 75 per cent of its total sales from the NRI market in a year's time.

At present, indiawonde-rs.com is positioned as a site providing a platform for merchants to facilitate their e-commerce activity and at the same time provide technological solutions to small merchants. The site retails 12 major categories and several sub-categories of products including handicrafts, speciality products like Mathurs pedas, books and electronic goods.

Says Mr Fahad Syed, director, Iwonders.com Pvt Ltd, ``In our second phase of expansion, we will assist merchants in their B2B transactions. Our services will include providing end-to-end technology solutions like product updates and stock inventory information on a weekly basis. For this, a licensing fee will be charged from the merchants.'' This will be an important source of revenue, besides the current trade margins. The saving on merchant showroom cost and salesman cost, helps provide a 5-35 per cent discount on products.

For the B2C transactions, merchants are not charged anything for being listed on the site. Only a 5 per cent transaction fee is charged once a transaction comes through. The listing extends to relevant offline information about the merchant's profile, like the kind of establishment, and his speciality, in order to ``increase consumers' comfort level andconfidence.''

indiawonders.com currently has 250 merchants registered with it. The company is chalking out an offline marketing campaign to popularise the site, where it will set up kiosks at high visibility points, where orders can be placed offline to be processed by the site. At a later stage, the kiosks will also have a Net connection. Shoppers' Stop at Delhi's Ansal's Plaza, will probably have such a kiosk in a month's time. It expects its offline marketing initiatives to account for 40 per cent of total sales.

With an investment of Rs 15-17 crore over two-and-half years, the portal hopes to break-even by the third year of operations by when it is projecting a turnover of Rs 22-25 crore. Iwonders.com Pvt Ltd is the Indian subsidiary of $ 120 million US-based software development company UCA Inc,whose clients include Chase Manhatten Bank and AIG Insurance.