What's trending in the retail e-commerce this season?

In markets where organised retail had deeper penetration, it took almost 12 - 15 years for brands to achieve 15% odd sales contribution from online. “This growth to my mind is more organic; however in India we believe the shift to be much faster than the developed markets.” Says Shivanandan Pare, Head of E-commerce, Trendin.com.  In a candid chat, he opens up about the brand Trendin.com & how it has emerged as the destination for all Madura Fashion & Lifestyle (MFL) brands.

What’s trending at Trendin.com?

Trendin.com has become the largest destination for all Madura Fashion & Lifestyle (MFL) brands (Allen Solly, Louis Philippe, Peter England, People and Van Heusen). Trendin.com is the destination where loyalists of these brands can select from the largest collection/choice. Trendin.com today ships to all the pin codes and delivers in top 10 cities within 72 hrs. The site offers all payment modes be it COD, Net banking, credit card or prepaid cards. Trendin.com also offers a hassle free length alteration facility to their customers, this is available across the store network of the brands for free.

What kind of strategies have you adopted at Trendin to make sure that it does not affect the sales at brick& mortar stores?

Actually the driving force behind our focus on trendin.com is to tap into growing shift of younger consumers to online shopping. This is main reason for having set up trendin.com. Having said this, we also consciously work towards attracting visitors to the site from geographies where our brand penetration is very high from awareness point of view but not so strong from the distribution/availability perspective. This we do by closely monitoring the search query volume at Google and targeting consumers segments at Facebook from these geographies. To a great extent we believe that trendin.com is enabling expansion of market for all Madura and Pantaloon brands.

Where do you see e-commerce market five years down the line?

In markets where organised retail had deeper penetration, it took almost 12 - 15 years for brands to achieve 15% odd sales contribution from online. This growth to my mind is more organic; however in India we believe the shift to be much faster than the developed markets. The main reason behind this being the growing Indian consumer class who are digital natives. The population born post 1985 is now becoming big spenders with higher disposable income in their hand. This segment is more net savvy and expressive via what they wear hence frequent shoppers. E-commerce lends to this trend beautifully because of the large options it offers in one single location plus the convenience of browsing anywhere, anytime and everywhere. I believe in a country like India, in five years, e-commerce would have garnered a market share of anywhere upwards of 7-8% of the total apparel market.

The most challenging and best aspect to sell online.

One of the main challenges from consumer purchase decision influencer aspect is that nothing can replace the basic desire of humans to see how they look after wearing a new garment before they pay for the same. This single desire of humans is very difficult to replace in online.
From a fulfillment perspective our logistics infrastructure falls short as it is not enabling us to deliver orders wider, deeper and faster.
The third aspect is the browsing infrastructure (bandwidth) esp. for mobile access has a long way to go for us to deliver to consumers rich media e-commerce content seamlessly