India's Online Shopping Spree

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Those complications give e-commerce locals a leg up over big foreign competitors like Amazon. Flipkart, which sends out 15 million shipments a day, has already built a network of 400 delivery personnel across 27 big Indian cities. Those advantages make it difficult for big foreign operations to wield power over smaller local shops. Flipkart, which has denied rumors that it is in acquisition talks with Amazon, says it wants to scale up on its own after securing seed money from Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Accel Partners and $31 million in funding from New York City's Tiger Global. "We have no plans to sell," says Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal, who quit his job as an Amazon software engineer in Bangalore to co-found the company with Binny Bansal in 2007.

He can afford to wait. A major Internet growth spurt is coming in India; it's just a matter of how soon and how big.