E-com Companies Bring Offline Retailers to Sell Big Brands on Their Sites

By siliconindia | Friday, 11 March 2016, 12:52 Hrs

Bengaluru: Today, the proliferation of online shopping has fundamentally impacted on customer behavior, creating more diffuse shopping experience that is increasingly being carried out over multiple online platforms. E-commerce capabilities are at the center of this diffusion and their ubiquity has opened up a wealth of new opportunities where big players like Samsung, LG and Sony are asking brick-and-mortar retail chains to come on the digital platform like Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal to sell niche consumer electronic brands.

Following this, Samsung and Sony have already set their online and offline price and formed a team to check rate variation with sellers being blacklisted for violation. LG India also announced that online purchasing are not same all the time or covered by warranty unless bought from its official website.

Further, the company’s senior executives from Croma, Reliance Digital, PlanetM Retail, Vijay Sales shared their views on best deals, pricing on large brands.“Discounts are not permanent. Hence they (e-tailers) are experimenting with various models and until now they haven’t found the right model,” said Kishore Biyani, CEO, Future Group.

Moreover, understanding the needs of discount and to improve financial statement, Abneesh Roy, Director, Edelweiss Securities Associate exclaims “the electronics makers had pushed back against online discounts in order to safeguard the interests of offline retailers. Big brands too are cautious about online discounts and have hence squeezed deals since they don’t want to upset the offline trade, which contributes 90% of their revenue. “Hence, ecommerce firms are now showing interest to partner with retail chains to access best of deals.”

These new initiatives offer companies to preserve their partnership with retail chains and to offering them special deals with exclusive launches.