Online marketplaces in India: companies and hiring

Online marketplaces

The big online marketplaces, where many sellers meet millions of buyers in one app

Think of buying a pair of running shoes on your phone during a big sale. You type "running shoes under ₹2,000". The app shows you shoes from dozens of sellers, perhaps one of them in Agra. It ranks them, shows each price and delivery date, takes your payment, and promises delivery by Thursday.

That app is an online marketplace: a website or app on which millions of sellers list their goods, and millions of buyers search, pay and wait for delivery. What a marketplace really sells is a set of services, and each one is software:

the search
the recommendation
the price
the payment (More on it in Market Segment 17.2, Payment gateways, in Industry Vertical 17, Payments.)
the tools for sellers
the promise of delivery (More on it in Market Segment 30.5, Last-mile delivery and shipping software, in Industry Vertical 30, Supply chain and logistics.)

One marketplace, six services: millions of sellers list their goods on one side, millions of buyers search and pay on the other, and in between sit the search, the recommendation, the price, the payment, the seller tools and the promise of delivery, each one software.

Much of the software behind the world's marketplaces is written in Bengaluru.

This is the first Market Segment of Domain VII, E-commerce, travel and logistics. It begins with the places people buy.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out. Amazon, the largest marketplace, is covered elsewhere. (More on it in the big-tech collection.) Walmart, which owns Flipkart, runs its own engineering centre in India, a global capability centre (GCC). A GCC is an engineering centre that a large foreign company runs in India for its own work. (More on it in the GCC collection.)

This Market Segment has two sub-segments. The first covers the global marketplaces that build their software in India. The second covers India's own marketplaces.

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The global marketplaces
India's own

The global marketplaces

Online marketplaces and auctions, home goods sold online, regional marketplaces, and local deals

Back to the search for running shoes from the start of this Market Segment. The search box you typed into may have been built in Bengaluru, for a marketplace in America, Europe or Asia.

eBay

with engineers in Bengaluru, has the most job postings in this Market Segment, and in this whole Industry Vertical. It runs a marketplace and auction site for sellers around the world. Its Bengaluru centre builds much of its search, payments, seller tools and AI.

Wayfair

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells furniture and home goods online in America and Europe. Its visual search and room-design tools help people buy a sofa they cannot touch.

Coupang

with engineers in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, is South Korea's largest online retailer, known for next-morning delivery.

noon

with engineers in Delhi, is the Middle East's marketplace, with its own warehouses and quick delivery. That is why noon also appears in Market Segment 30.2, Warehouse management systems (WMS) and warehouse robotics (in Industry Vertical 30, Supply chain and logistics).

Groupon

sells deals on local experiences.

India's own

Indian online marketplaces, fashion sold online, and social commerce for small towns

Now the same shoes, bought from an Indian marketplace. India's own marketplaces are built in the same city, Bengaluru.

Flipkart

with engineers in Bengaluru, is India's largest e-commerce company, and it is owned by Walmart. It sells everything from phones to groceries. It also runs the sale days on which much of India shops.

Myntra

with engineers in Bengaluru, is Flipkart's fashion marketplace.

Meesho

with engineers in Bengaluru, is the marketplace of India's smaller towns. It is built on three things: unbranded goods, zero commission for sellers, and social sharing, where buyers share products with friends, for example on WhatsApp. It has grown to rival the largest marketplaces in number of orders.

Built in India, sold around the world: from Bengaluru, engineers build eBay for sellers around the world, Wayfair for America and Europe and Coupang for South Korea (with Hyderabad), as well as Flipkart, Myntra and Meesho for India; noon, the Middle East's marketplace, has its engineers in Delhi.

One company here is covered mainly in another Market Segment:

Material Depot

with engineers in Bengaluru, runs a marketplace for interior materials. It is covered mainly in Market Segment 41.6, Home interiors and renovation platforms (in Industry Vertical 41, Proptech).

Shopping by conversation.

The marketplace's search box is becoming an assistant. The shopper describes what they want, in their own language, and an AI model finds it, compares it and answers questions about it. India's marketplaces are building assistants in Hindi and other Indian languages, for buyers who have never typed a search. The global marketplaces are adding AI agents that buy on the shopper's behalf. An AI agent is software that uses a language model, the kind of AI behind chatbots, to take actions on its own.

Shopping by conversation: today the shopper types keywords and compares a list; the assistant now being built understands a request in Hindi or another Indian language and finds, compares and answers; next, an AI agent buys on the shopper's behalf.

That is the big online marketplace: search, price, payment and delivery, built for millions of sellers and buyers, and much of it written in Bengaluru.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What e-commerce and D2C brands companies hire for.

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