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Anupam Bansal, Executive Director at Liberty Group, has been looking at ways to increase footfalls to his stores as he is not keen on peddling his footwear products online.
The Delhi-based footwear major is negotiating with Shopsity, a start-up that helps consumers locate fashion brands at neighbourhood stores through an app. Driving footfalls at brick-and-mortar stores has become a mission for a few start-ups planning to give e-commerce companies some competition.
They describe themselves as being ‘anti e-commerce’ and lure online shoppers with better value propositions at the nearest offline retailer.
Apart from Shopsity, which caters to the Delhi NCR region, there are others such as VBuy.in, Price Baba and Zopper building business models based on comparisons of products and prices at neighbourhood retailers. They provide this service for products across categories such as fashion, grocery, IT, telecom and furniture.
‘Against e-commerce’“Our model is such that it works against the e-commerce players. We know there are brick and mortar retailers who are against e-commerce sites and we are helping such retailers through our app, which guides consumers in locating their preferred fashion brands at the nearest offline store. In effect we are ‘anti e-commerce’,” states Danish Ahmed, CEO and Founder, Shopsity, and ex-founder of online fashion portal Yebhi.
With the tagline ‘Discover fashion, nearby’, Shopsity already has 30 brands and 2,000 retailers in the Delhi NCR region.
For electronic productsTiger Global-funded Zopper provides price comparisons for electronic products, and helps online browsers locate the nearest offline retailer with similar products.
“We are giving competition to the marketplace sites of online players by offering deals from local retailers. Today we have 5,000 brick and mortar retailers across Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore,” says Neeraj Jain, Co-Founder and CEO, Zopper.
VBuy.in, a year old Chennai-based price-discovery start-up, also helps users locate the nearest retailer for IT and telecom products.
“With real-time stock and inventory updates of products and prices at the nearest local store, there are times when our prices have been lower than Flipkart’s for the latest Samsung phone models,” says Sivakumar Anirudhan, Founder & CEO, VBuy.
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