Just like a brick n mortar hypermarket makes you spend more out of your wallet than what you actually had planned for before entering it, an online hypermarket is making people spend twice as more or much much more as what they would not have even thought of buying, let alone entering an e-commerce site, simply because of the fact that we are so wired digitally to internet and social media through our smartphones and tablets, we are pushed to go to a site and make multiple purchases online with deals and discount vouchers camouflaging the inherent weakness in low stock upturns and slow cash flow.
Nowadays, 35% of Smartphones are sold online, 15% of Televisions (LED) are sold online, and 8% of appliances are sold online, in terms of sales revenue. These are overwhelming numbers in absolute terms for any emerging market.
After the success of wide format and multi-brand online retailers like Flipkart and Amazon, we have seen hundreds of online sites retailing consumer utility products and items of frequent household use stepping up momentum to induce buyers to buy such items for which we have until now been going to our friendly mohalla (neighborhood) stores. Each one of these retailers is trying to create a niche by positioning itself as something different and more fair than its much bigger counterpart, and more often than not, these new retailers have been successful too. It’s not an easy journey though, because it is still early days of growth, and survival, and focus on building up actual revenue growth gets side-stepped with the kind of aggressive high-pitch promotional campaigns they run making use of investors’ money, in a bid to generate quick brand recall.
One of the lucrative segments is of gifts, because traditionally we haven’t ever had gift-focused brands or showrooms, leave alone tier 2 and tier 3 towns, but even in metro cities where people are willing to empty their deep pockets if they find some gift items worth it’s creativity and design. And these days, we just need excuse to gift something to someone in family or among friends. An equally lucrative segment for online e-commerce is of interior decoration and showcase products that adorn the living rooms.
Not just products and items involving less emotional buying, we are witnessing some innovative e-commerce ideas taking shape in selling online building products and interior decoration & furnishings, which is actually high-cost segment and where people tend to decide on buying something only after physically evaluating the products.
But the future these days seem to be in selling online products which are of regular daily household usage and where possibility of returning the product does not arise much. Advantage to both online resellers as well as manufacturers is that these products go in heavy volume and people do not care much of brand and quality, although this is not to say that quality aspect is overlooked. But it’s a safe category for e-commerce.
We at Raas, could help you find the right strategy and resulting business plans and promote your products online and also develop long term strategic plan to position and target the right audience.