Retail Dude

Social media tools like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, Buzz etc. introduced a fun element in teaching. Don’t be surprised I am not going to talk about education in India. Actually these tools helped India to raise its computer literacy rate from single digit to double digit, which is one of the important factor to promote etailing in India. I will give credit to IRCTC & Makemytrip for making Indian consumer more comfortable in doing online transactions, but will appreciate social media tools how they boosted “e” presence in India.

The volume of online sale is still less but this mode of shopping is catching popularity through word of mouth, and retailers are bidding on ecommerce growth. Thus we can see “Future group” online shopping destination as www.futurebazaar.com, “Shoppers stop” virtual shop as www.Shopperstop.com and www.themobilestore.in of “The mobile store”.

By the way India has its virtual stores since mid 90’s, and the players like “IndiaMart” and “Fabmall” now known as “Indiaplaza” are among those who established a stepping stone for ecommerce in India. Now we have many such online shops where you can find anything ranging from furniture to T-Shirts and books to gadgets such as www.homeshop18.com, www.shopmania.in, shopping @ sify, rediff and indiatimes, www.retailsdirect.com, www.indiavarta.com, eshop.webindia123.com etc but they lack leading brands. They have “Your brand dual sim phone” but not a “Philip DVD player”, but with retailers opening their online store things are changing but they still have very limited merchandise on their online shop. I hope soon we can see range of branded merchandise from Levis Jeanswear to Titan watch.

After doing some research I was able to draw a profile of Indian shopper - An Indian Online shopper is a “male” of age between “18- 35”, is a graduated doing job and prefer to shop from its work location. Women still prefer brick and mortar store and don’t want to miss trails and store ambience.

Recently Google also launched their shopping tool for google.co.in domain where you can search your product and can see results from all this online shops. All these things indicating a detour for shopping – an online store – new shopping avenue for Indian Shoppers.

- Prateek Katiyar

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So everyone is in recovery mode now after such a long and dark tunnel of recession we are able to see the rays of light coming toward us from the end of it. We are in a transition, and retailers are looking for a platform to jump quickly on the other side. While US retailers are waiting for fall festive season, in India its already festival’s aroma in the air and Indian retailers are leveraging it to it’s extend.  

Indian retail market which is US$ 511 bn. in size and is the fifth largest retail destination globally is becoming lucrative market for international retailers. But due to regulations on FDI in retail, they are still standing on the edge to enter India, and trying different back doors to get them involved in emerging economy which has been ranked as the most attractive emerging market for investment in the retail sector by AT Kearney’s eighth annual Global Retail Development Index (GRDI), in 2009. Ecommerce is definitely the one channel that provides retailers a global presence, but because of physical distances between countries, custom duty and merchandise shipping laws these etailing website ultimately divided into local domains and just serve local countries.

Indian ecommerce market worth approx. US$ 2 bn. and predicted to grow to around $6 billion by 2011. Currently out of which the major chunk comes from travel industry. Etailing only accounts 12% of total ecomm market of India. India’s etailing also divided into two categories –

1.       Online retailing like futurebazaar.com

2.       Online auction/marketplace like ebay.com

While online retailing websites are still struggling for their space, online auction/market place sites rules the virtual market and Ebay is the king of online space of India with about 1.5 mn. unique users per month but still its lame as compared to US ebusiness. Ebay still need to reach the critical masses and this only happen when Indian ecomm business is actually accepted my more people. There are many factors which restricted Indian population to use online channel for shopping but people are overcoming this and are willing to try this channel.

Ebusiness is supposed to be a global visa for retailers and utilizing the same ebay initiated “global easy buy” platform just in the mid of festival season which allows Indian shoppers to buy from international Ebay merchants directly (currently Ebay US) with international shipping and handling facility for all products. But for the international product you have to customs duties and international shipping charges which definitely make that international product little expensive but still u can enjoy global deals while sitting in your home, and even get Harley Davidson jacket delivered just before you going to blow a cracker on diwali. This is not it, ebay is also providing free gifts with your purchases and a mega gift in a lucky draw. Now these freebies can change your perception on international product’s prices.

Ebay again with its innovation trying to dig deeper into virtual market of India to reach the gold mine hidden below it. And I hope as a leader it will soon be able to see the tipping point of it.

Readers give ebay global easy buy a try and happy diwali to you all.

- Prateek

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It’s a long time we talk about green – a buzz word of the past as in the recent time it was busted by the more powerful words like RECISSION, ECONOMIC CRISIS etc. But what I think is this crisis gave more motivation to retailers to make their business model more sustainable and future proof, so that they can erase the word crisis from their business books. And this sustainability is tightly related with Green initiations. But this green thing is not only for sustainability, if you can be creative in sustaining you can also win awards and also free media coverage and in result good word of mouth and advertising for FREEE. So where are these goodies -?

I came across two such communities who organize the Green awards and I think there might be more. And there main reason behind this is to create awareness of Green issues and to promote companies to reduce their carbon footprint and to serve the society in a better and sustainable manner.

The first organization is GREEN (GREEN is a catalyst for social and environmental change), UK’s first truly green communication agencies who organized Green Awards. And according to them the Green Awards were set up to recognize and reward creative work that communicates the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility, sustainable development and ethical best practice in any sector and across any marketing discipline. The award was launched in 2006 and in the three years since its inception, the ceremony has become established as a major event on the eco-calendar, enjoying great prestige and substantial media coverage.

And the GREEN 2008 Goes to —-

1. Green Awards GRAND PRIX & Best Green Internal Communications)- Nokia: The Power of We

2. Best Green Outdoor- Coca-Cola GB: Talent From Trash

3. Best Green Packaging - Lush Ltd: Squeaky Green - There’s no greener packaging than no packaging & Cadbury: Cadbury Eco-Eggs

4. Best Green Website - Friends of the Earth: The Big Ask(www.thebigask.com) & largeblue: green.tv(www.green.tv)

The second organization is IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group) which is a membership community for the e-retail industry, whose vision is to maximize the commercial potential of online shopping. With more than 18 years experience in a rapidly-changing e-commerce market IMRG help members maximize the business opportunities, and stay up to date with developments in the e-retail marketplace.

The IMRG celebrates the green initiatives by organizing “The Online Green Awards” . More than 140 business leaders, academics and representatives of industry associations gathered together for the second annual On Line Green Awards – affectionately known as the OLGA’s – at the Kensington Roof Gardens in London.

And the OLGA 2008 winners are

1. Consumer Award Winners –

a. Small Retailer - Celtic Sheepskin

b. Large Retailer – Ocado

2. Panel Award Winners –

a. Small Retailer - Arena Flowers

b. Large Retailer - Dixons.co.uk

c. Large Supplier - Home Delivery Network

d. Green Thinker – Kelkoo

e. Grand Prix – eBay

You can surf through following links for more info and nominations –

GREEN - http://www.greenawards.co.uk/

IMRG - http://www.imrg.org/

One more interesting website to know your Own “Personal Carbon Footprint” –

http://mtc/InGreen/Pages/HouseholdEmissions.aspx

- Prateek Katiyar

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Riding on the wave of transformation, Where every retailer is changing his color to green just to attract more customers and to show that “they really care”. The brick & mortar models have goals all set! and plans all ready! to implement, even the budget has been allocated for the greenness. The giant retailers like Walmart, Tesco and Target have even rolled out the plan and are trying to become more greener than each other. In this race the pure play click models are not lagging behind, the largest e-tailer - Amazon has joined the green wagon and are storing the green products for their customers. It has launched “Amazon Green Section”, which lists products customers have selected as most environment-friendly, from cleaning supplies to computers to personal solar chargers. Check out the list here

- Prateek Katiyar

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From the huge success of the films like “Batman-The Dark Knight” and also like Spider-man series, Superman series, Hellboy, Hancock etc. anyone can easily predict that we all love super heroes, and we all want to be like them, everybody wants power in their own hands. And here are retailers - the organized players who are striving day and night to provide power in the hands of their customer. Unlike kirana stores where a customer usually give the list of items he wants to buy and store owner gives item of brand which he keeps (or on which he is getting greater margins), organized retailer provide a ambiance where a customer can have greater variety and deeper assortment and most importantly the power to choose by himself whatever he wants. A customer can trail, can test can even preview things. But power is a thing which everybody wants more and more, so the retailers are onto it, now the customer have power to shop from home (e-shop), shop on the move(m-shop), can compare real time prices(Internet enabled kiosks), can check latest fashion and can even preview them & see how you look in to that one(smart mirrors). So the customer of today is far more powerful than that of the yesterday’s customer and have all the shopping weapons handy. Is this it? No.. now a shopper can even checkout from the shop on his own and can avoid the long que and can save time. A shopper can use a smart trolley which  can scan the items that the shopper put inside it and will tell the total amount on the display. A shopper can pay on the kiosk during checkout using his own loyalty member no. and credit cards. The common quote in the service industry is “Customer is a God”, so now Customer is a God and he also have a power in his hands.

Supershopper - “Everything is under control over and out”

- Prateek Katiyar

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