A New Dawn For The Brick-And-Mortar Retailers As Online Discount Hype Drops

Heavy discounts and lots of advertising from the online counterparts had nearly drowned the brick-and-mortar retail markets. With the newfound love that customers had developed for online shopping, or should we say the ‘luring’ discounts offered online!

However, with online sellers avoiding deep discounts to shore up their finances, customers seem to come back to the brick-and-mortar retail stores, bringing back their days of glory.

As people came looking for aggressive promotions and strong demand for fresh merchandise, Same-store sales were at their highest in four years in the last quarter of 2015, "The competition intensity has no doubt reduced vis-a-vis online," Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani told ET. "This is just the beginning of their downfall since the e-commerce model of discounting was never there to stay."

Shoppers Stop Ltd’s like-to-like sales growth last quarter for the Shoppers Stop department stores stood at 0.8%, the lowest for past 12 quarters. Like-to-like sales growth refers to comparable sales growth from stores that have had operations for over a year and does not take into account growth coming due to new stores. While Shoppers Stop and Future Lifestyle recorded an 18% growth in Sep-Dec quarter, Lifestyle International, Arrow and Flying Machine grew at 12 to 15%, a two-year high for them.

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