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Wary of online shopping? Recalling halcyon days of offline shopping, but have no time for it now?
Fashion marketplace aggregator Fashalot aims to bridge the gap between offline retail outlets and shoppers with the help of technology.
The platform, which secured an undisclosed pre-Series A funding led by YourNest and marquee investor Rajul Garg in March, is now all set to expand to more metros and Tier-I and II cities by March 2017.
Fashalot, an O2O (online-to-offline), location-based fashion and store-discovery platform, is currently available in Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru. “We plan to expand to Mumbai, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Lucknow and Chandigarh,” Rishi Batra, co-founder, COO and CFO, told BusinessLine .
The app-based platform helps shoppers discover shopping spots and communicate with brands as well, if needed. It reconnects potential customers with brick-and-mortar outlets in their neighbourhood. The platform enables consumers to discover the latest fashion trends and in-store and cash-back offers from retail outlets in their vicinity, he said.
Partnership Batra said Fashalot is now focusing on nation-wide commercial partnership with various fashion brands. From the existing 3,000 stores on its app, it expects to tie up with 10,000 outlets by March 2017. About 50 per cent of its stores are regional brands and single stores.
An average of 20 customers visit a store per month through Fashalot. “By March 2017, we expect the number to increase to 100 customers at each of the 10,000 stores we plan to connect with.” The platform has seen 30 per cent repeat transactions.
“Fashalotcurrently contributes 10-12 per cent of revenues to some brand partners,” he said.
The platform gets a fixed monthly fee and a commission of 7.5-10 per cent of the sales from various brands.
Launched in April 2015, Fashalot clocked ₹20 crore worth of gross merchandise volume in June 2016, which is, with a current 100 per cent month-on-month growth, expected to increase to ₹75-100 crore in July due to the coming festival season, he said.
Fashalot was conceived by three friends — Amit Koshal, Amit Sharma and Rishi Batra — while ordering food from a restaurant-discovery app at a house party, as their wives discussed fashion and other shopping options.
They found that despite the rise of e-commerce, a significant percentage of retail market was still offline. This led them to create a horizontal mobile platform to help shoppers discover fashion around them and help retailers get footfalls.
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