DECEMBER 20198As Chartered accountant & retail professional, Kumar has a part of some leading companies like the Shoppers Stop Group in India, IBM and othersBy Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO, Retailers Association of Indiarom having to visit specific locales to buy certain things, to being able to order any-thing from any corner of the globe with a mere swipe of our smartphones and getting it delivered at our doorsteps ­ we have come a long way as a society, and as consumers. Transformation Phases of Indian According to the RAI ­ Knight Frank report Think India. Think Connected Retail, it all began with a handful of shopping centres, lined with specialty retailers, mushrooming in the retail markets of the country's top cities during the mid-1990s. The `shopping centre culture' gradually pervaded the entire country.The next big wave that accelerated modern retail in India is e-Commerce and sale of prod-ucts & services through telephone and television. The factors catalysing the trend are improved In-formation technology (IT) infrastructure, strides in digital technology, and payments. Technol-ogy allowed retailers to catalogue thousands of products online and provide tools to review, compare and buy items using digital methods of payment virtually. All this could be also done through an app.This is when the focus really shifted to the consumers and their convenience, for it was dur-ing this period that several consumer-centric concepts like cash on delivery, no questions asked exchange policy, and newer modes of payments, mobile wallets, and UPI got introduced. RETAIL IN INDIA: GETTING SMARTKumar Rajagopalan,CEOFCXO INSIGHTS
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