TV18 Group's television and online retailing venture HomeShop18 recently sold a 15% stake to GS Home Shopping, a Korean retailer. In this context, Businessworld has an interview with Tae Soo Huh, president, GS Home Shopping (earlier called LG home shopping), Raghav Bahl, founding-promoter and MD of Network18 and Sundeep Malhotra, CEO of HomeShop18. You launched in April 2008 with a bang, but the business does not seem to have gained much traction... Sundeep Malhotra: We started when there was a lot of scepticism because of the poor response to teleshopping. But HomeShop18 is not teleshopping. Initially, we had little domain knowledge about the market, and we did not know whether to focus on the metros, or the tier-II and III cities. Today, we are doing a sale every eight seconds with sales of Rs 1 crore a day. We are serving 2,750 towns and cities with 20,000 products and 600 employees. Raghav Bahl: In the first year, with a commission-on-sales of 23.5 per cent, we made a net inco...