Offline retailers venturing online find the going tough

In the last one year, many Indian business houses have jumped on to the e-commerce bandwagon by launching their online ventures. But a closer look at their sales numbers, it seems that it’s not been an easy ride for most of them.

Aditya Birla Group’s Abof.com, textile major Arvind’s NNNow.com and Reliance Industries’ Ajio, all fashion and lifestyle e-tailers, targeted clocking in a monthly gross merchandise value, or GMV ofup to Rs 10 crores,. A few like Abof recently started selling on Amazon to gain from its traffic and prop up its visibility in the midst of competition from well established e-commerce players like Myntra and Amazon Fashion.

These traditional retailers say they’ve stopped giving heavy discounts compared to their online-only peers who gained handsomely taking this route. According to industry estimates, Arvind’s NNNow.com is clocking in about Rs 4-5 crore monthly GMV while Abof.com is doing around Rs 10 crores. These retailers also dismiss GMV as the right metric to gauge the growth and scale of online businesses. Abof.com claims it’s different from existing e-commerce packs as its core proposition are to create a mega lifestyle brand online which will run across categories.

On the other hand it NNNow.com isn’t looking at GMV-led discounting. Instead, it is focusing on an omni-channel strategy for its business. Out of 1,200 stores that it runs, 350 are live with NNNow.com where consumers can place orders which will act as warehouses for NNNow.com.