Why are Indian retail giants wary of online presence?
on October 29th, 2007 at 7:07 amA lot has been said and written about the growth of organised retail market in India and how big corporates, either solely or though foreign partners, would change the landscape of the country’s retail scenario with huge investments and nationwide presence.But the startling observation is the absence of own websites of these retail companies. Whatever information one gets is only though newspaper reports, magazines and blogs. There is nothing official from the company platform in terms of their plans, network, products, offers and investment pattern.
Leading retail players like Reliance Retail, Subhiksha, Aditya Birla Retail, Bharti does not have a dedicated website of their own. They just have a press release or media kit as the only source of information about the venture.
To top it all, a consumer even in this era cannot find a location of the nearest retail store or what all the store has to offer in terms of product range. Only Future Group’s Pantaloon have a good presence clearly stating its lines of business and store locations to add to its online business portal, futurebazaar.com.
Even websites of big mall developers lack in terms of information regarding presence of retailers in their malls. Though Hypermarket Chains like Spencers, Westside, Shopper’s Stop maintain a well-designed updated website.
It is difficult to single out what goes behind the minds of retail companies to not give information about their company on website. Even websites of global retail giants like Walmart, Tesco cannot be said to among the most informative and distinctive as compared to websites of world’s leading brands.
Maybe the retail companies think that their business is highly offline and does not feel the need for having an online presence. Another line of thinking could be that once the business achieves scale and nationwide presence, they could ramp up their online presence.
