The e-commerce giants are competing to provide various discounts and a seamless shopping experience to the consumers as it will let them win the retail share. Eventually, this move taken by the online retailers are making it difficult for the brick and mortar stores. Now, these retailers are entering the fight against the e-tailers by means of innovative technologies that are introduced by the new startups.
Regarding this, Anup Balagopal, Founder of Torchsight claims that they are doing what Google Analytics does for the e-commerce portals but for an offline retailer. The firm captures the wireless signals from the smartphones of consumers for data collection and analysis on the cloud. He adds that the e-tailers have lot of consumer data stored, while the offline retailers do not.
Torchsight was launched in May and it is hosted currently by Target Accelerator, but it is already used by over 50 stores spread across 11 cities inIndia. It is believed that they will reach over 250 stores by the end of this fiscal year ending with March 2015. The details gathered from customers will be used to make the data driven decisions on marketing campaigns, loyalty programmes and others.
Besides this, nine month old Shopsense has fitted large touch screens or tablets in the fashion retail stores for the consumers to visualize how different clothing combinations would look like. These digital visualizations were tried out on Salman Khan in the clothing chain Being Human owned by him.
Now, Shopsense is available in 45 stores acrossIndiawhere 35 percent customers use the device helping them to shop 35 percent more than the average customers. Also, these stores driven by Shopsense are achieving 12 percent increased sales without providing any discounts.
Sasha Mirchandani of Kae Capital, an early investor in Shopsense, claims that there is a huge market opportunity, but there is a big gap in the offline retail analytics when it comes to the Indian market. Shopsense’s model is non-intrusive and more useful to the retailers, she added.
As per India Brand Equity Foundation till April, the organized retail inIndiaaccounted for 8 percent of overall retail. While overall retail is growing at 7 percent annually, organized retail is booming at a great rate of 26 percent. It is estimated that by 2020, the total retail market will be reaching $1.3 trillion comprising of $220 billion or 150,000 stores being organized with the leading categories being fashion and footwear accounting for 40 percent.
