Future Bazaar CEO Sankarson Banerjee tells Business Standard that the company is expecting turnover to treble from Rs. 62 crores to Rs. 182 crores – they’ll redesign, add regional brands and new products, and go offline. Going offline shouldn’t be an issue for the KPCB and Sherpalo backed company, which is owned by Kishore Biyani’s Future Group.
If you take a close look at the site, it mentions the statistics we’ve put up on the right – Page Views, (average) Savings per item, and average shipout time. So from the time an order is placed, it takes Future Bazaar 4.8 days to ship-out an item, i.e. to leave their warehouse and not the time it takes to deliver. Which means that if you ordered tomatoes*, the only thing you can use them for, is to take aim at the delivery guy.
While I’m not saying that 4-10 days is bad, remember that in urban India, you’re competing with retail stores that aren’t too far away from home/work, and some even deliver. Also, I have to question this notion of “savings”. Maybe this is a one-off example, but I bought a 500GB Seagate External HDD a month ago for around Rs. 5200 (with bill and warranty). Future Bazaar has a 160 GB Seagate HDD for Rs. 4999, a 250 GB HDD for Rs. 5750. So not really a saving, though they are comparing with the list price, which is considerably higher, and are offering a 56-58% discount. So I got a discount of around 75%, and can even have the product delivered to me within a few hours. Not much of a competition, eh? Anyway – a more realistic price here, though you can still get it cheaper offline.
Please note that I’m not trying to discredit Future Bazaar – only saying that if the status remains the same, online retail stores will be limited to customers who either don’t know better, or are not in the main cities. Or for some obscure book that the Oxford Bookstore doesn’t stock. Not really for daily purchases, is it?
There is a tendency to underestimate the importance of retail in the online business – the ease of purchasing goods online, the quality of the goods delivered and the time taken for delivery and the ease of dispute resolution will make consumers more comfortable with spending money online. This in turn will help other businesses make money – the online travel business deserves credit for converting viewers into buyers; Retail has its own part to play.
*- Thankfully for the delivery guy, Future Bazaar doesn’t retail tomatoes and other perishables.
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5 Comments until now.
Where did u get the Hard drive for 5200? that’s quite a steal. only a 3 years ago a 400 gig drive used to cost some 17K
well, three years is a lifetime in the disks business, isn’t it? I got it from Nehru Place for 5200. If you visit gadgets.in, which i stumbled upon while looking at other retailers – they have it available for around 5600.
I’m guessing (as the links seem to be broken) that the 160 and 250Gb drives you’ve mentioned are portable ones, not the jumbo ones that are only good for putting on your desk. Considering that, it seems a fair enough price…
Still nothing beats Nehru Place (or Lamington Road @ Mumbai) for convenience.
Not really…I’d bought the 160GB in December last year for 5.1k. Dont tell me it’s been 9 months and prices haven’t dropped :D I just checked – it’s around 4K…almost 1k less than FutureBazaar’s price.
There has been a 500 GB external Maxtor drive available at NP at 4800 for a while now. The only downer is that it needs external power, but it has permanently gotten my old PC locked up for good.