Rashmi Pratap, The Hindu Businessline Mumbai, 28 August 2015 As online shopping grows more popular by the day, Kishore Biyani, the man who catapulted brick-and-mortar retail to new heights in India, found himself scouting for the next big idea. The founder and chief executive officer of Future Group has now identified a new frontier to conquer — customers at Rajasthan’s public distribution system (PDS) outlets. This group of buyers includes those below poverty line and beneficiaries of various food programmes of the state government. All of them get a monthly quota of sugar, wheat and kerosene at subsidised rates. Biyani…
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Mehak Sharma, Indiaretailing.com New Delhi, 27 August 2015 Joining the league of e-tailers with offline presence, furniture e-tailer Pepperfry has taken on lease 1,800 sq ft of retail space on a Mumbai high street, property consultant JLL said in a recent report. "Pepperfry has joined the list of e-tailers going 'hybrid' by recently leasing a 1,800 sq ft space at Linking Road, Santacruz," JLL India Chairman and Country Head Anuj Puri said. The trend of ecommerce players foraying into physical retail is fairly new to India. However, in the past few years, a slew of pure-play e-tailing companies, including Lenskart,…
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Anumeha Yadav, Scroll.in New Delhi, 21 August 2015 On Thursday, the Rajasthan government signed an agreement with Kishore Biyani's Future Group, best known for its retail chains Pantaloons and Big Bazaar, to launch the new Annapurna Bhandar Yojana. Chief minister Vasundhara Raje described the scheme aimed at an upgrade of ration shops as the beginning of a “new era of public private partnership in the public distribution system.” Raje had earlier in July announced that public schools and health centres will be handed over to private players under a PPP model. Ration or fair price shops provide wheat, rice, sugar,…
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Varun Jain , The Economic Times New Delhi, 11 August 2015 India's increasingly app-only online marketplaces are promising richer shopping experience when 4G, the mobile telecom technology that offers quick data downloads, gains more traction. Flipkart, Snapdeal and Myntra will load streaming video content and visual search feature to help shoppers select products, said top executives at these companies. Flipkart, in fact, already launched a visual search feature. Fourth-generation, or 4G, telecom technology allows downloads several times faster than 3G and 2G, the more common technologies. Bharti Airtel, which recently launched 4G in nearly 300 towns, says its service allows…
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Shambhavi Anand & Rasul Bailay, The Economic Times New Delhi, 3 August 2015 The stage is set for the next big fight in the online world as new CEOs take the helm at the top fashion ecommerce companies amid mounting challenges of getting customers to buy clothes and accessories without deep discounting. Over the past few quarters, sales at online fashion companies have slowed as they tried to cut the millions of dollars that went into subsidising products to lure customers with heavy discounting. The change of guard now becomes even more pertinent for growth, analysts said. Two weeks ago,…
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