Zara to maintain price parity between offline and online retail

Spanish fashion brand Zara will not offer any special discount to lure customers to its newly launched e-commerce site in India and will maintain price parity between online and brick-and-mortar outlets. Jesús Echevarría, Chief Communications and Corporate Affairs Officer at Inditex, owner of Zara says the brand will offer the full range of articles that the brand currently offers in its stores at the country, the same prices and the same commercial policy.

Zara rolled out its e-commerce site in India this week, seven years after it set foot in the country. Over the years, India’s e-commerce market has become synonymous with heavy discounting.

A host of heavily foreign-funded e-commerce players such as Flipkart, Amazon and Myntra, which stormed the Indian retail market by offering heavy discounts on products to lure otherwise conservative shoppers to buy online in the last 4-5 years, continue to offer significant discounts to retain their customers and add new ones.

Zara wants to be different. The world’s largest fashion brand by sales, which operates 20 physical stores in India, is already the biggest international apparelbrand in the country with sales of Rs 1,023 crore during 2016-17. E-commerce foray will help it reach customers across the country. Zara has lately been facing competition from its global rival Hennes & Maurtiz (H&M) whose sales in India more than doubled in the nine months to August from a year ago.

Compared to the performance of H&M and Zara, several global brands including Levi Strauss and Benetton, which have been around for two decades, and Marks & Spencer, which started a decade ago, have been posting annual sales of Rs 700-800 crore.