After almost a year, Tata Sons-promoted Infiniti Retail, which owns the Croma brand of stores, has ended its strategic partnership with Snapdeal, one of the largest marketplaces in the e-commerce space.

It is now banking on its own e-commerce capabilities through its own site – Croma.com which it had launched nearly three years ago — and engaging in an omni channel model with the hope of diverting more traffic to its stores.

“We have now corrected our online strategy with a new one, which is more relevant, through own existing site croma.com. Today, we are no longer available on Snapdeal and have built capabilities through our own online strategy, said Ritesh Ghosal, Chief Marketing Officer, Croma.

In 2014, Infiniti Retail and Snapdeal had forged a tie up to jointly work towards market development initiatives, establishment of joint collaboration on customer and vendor outreach programmes and category development. Both the partners had planned exclusive launches of products and brands in select categories.

“We already have the advantage of our stores and now we have created an interactive digital strategy to reach out to consumers who want to see our products online. In fact, during Diwali we had 60 per cent of consumers checking out the products online through our site before visiting the Croma store,’’ added Ghosal.

Product pricing However, there is pricing parity between the products sold between its online site and offline stores with no discounting schemes which are synonymous with most e-commerce players.

Industry observers claim that for Snapdeal, Croma was just another player on its market place and that most offline stores prefer to use such platforms temporarily till such time they develop their own capabilities in e-commerce.

Recently, Shoppers Stop too forged a tie up with Snapdeal to set up its marketplace. But Snapdeal’s platform is being viewed more as a means to scale up revenues till such time its own e-commerce site stabilises. As Govind Shrikhande, Managing Director, Shoppers Stop, says, “Our own site is still not that big and will take time to stabilise. Our tie up with Snapdeal will allow our marketplace to scale up. But our own site will not be a marketplace but a real store with exclusive private brands.’’

Even Future Group decided to sell its private labels on Amazon as a stop gap measure before it becomes more competent with its own omni channel operations. “E-commerce players sell the same products that we have at our stores. After Amazon we do not have any plans to sell through any other e-commerce site,’’ said Kishore Biyani, CEO, Future Group.

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