Online sellers offering huge discounts

New age e-commerce sites giving discounts is gaining

traction with both investors and consumers. While Fashion and You raised $8 million from Sequoia Capital early this month, last month Accel India Venture Fund and Helion Advisors invested $2.8 million in Exclusively.in. Some others such as 99 Labels are close to raising private capital. It’s mostly the youngsters who are buying on these websites as they offer entertainment options, as well as brands, at discounted prices. Most of these sites are not more than a year old and have made the best use of their first year-end sales. The number of members and transactions that these websites are registering gives an idea about the increasing online shopping mania.

Earlier shoppers used to be busy snatching the best deals at their favourite stores offering a flat 50 per cent off, now there are better deals available on the net on a host of websites, which offer up to 80 per cent discount, besides, the comfort of shopping from home. Deals and You claims to have a transaction every minute and serving a pool of six lakhs members. Likewise, SnapDeal says it adds 10,000 new members everyday to its subscriber base of one million. Fashion and You ships out almost 2,000 products a day, which is up from 1,500 a day average of last month. Similarly, 99 Labels boasts of 600-1,200 transactions per day.

The Co-founder of 99 Labels, Anchal Jain says for them, December sales have jumped three-and-a-half times. SnapDeal recently sold 1,000 watches in a day at one-seventh the market price. Similarly, on portals such as Fashion and You and 99 Labels, perfumes and watches are selling like hot cakes this season. Moreover not only residents of metros are buying online; 99 Labels and Fashion and You, claims to have 35 per cent orders from non-metros. At the same time, low Internet penetration, fewer credit card users and the fact that people in India still prefer to ‘touch and feel’ a product before buying it, are some of the obstacles that the portals are trying to overcome.