Even as leading e-tailers such as Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal still see a major part of their sales coming through discounts, Tata Group’s e-commerce platform, Tata CLiQ, says about 50 per cent of its products are sold at full price. The company, which registered 20 per cent quarter-on-quarter growth at a compounded rate, claims to have seen the best unit economics in profitability last year, compared with others.

Ashutosh Pandey, CEO, Tata CLiQ told BuisnessLine that the one-year-old company is not much into discounting, and believes in an economically viable business model. “We sell 50 per cent of our products at full price and it is a very strong number,” Pandey said.

In general, the percentage of products sold online through discounts is still as high as 65-70 per cent, said Anil Kumar, CEO of research firm for online companies RedSeer Consulting. He said though the intensity of discounts at most of the e-commerce companies have down from the 2014-15 levels, the number of products on discount is still high.

Brand recall

However, Kumar mentioned that the brand recall for new players such as CLiQ or Aditya Birla’s Abof will be very low among consumers at this moment. Consumers go to these sites for a particular brand/product; vis-a-vis, pure-play e-commerce players’ discounts still remain the major attraction.

CLiQ, owned by Tata Unistore (a joint venture between Tata Industries and retailer Trent), expects to grow over 150 per cent year-on-year in 2017-18 with focus on its phygital strategy (physical and digital), premium brands, low fulfilment costs and by entering into more categories such as kids, jewellery and home furnishing.

It currently offers over 800 active brands across categories such as apparel, electronics, watches and footwear. Of this, 50 are phygital partners with a phygital store network of 1,000 stores across 10,000 pin codes. The plan is to double the store network to 2,000 by this year.

“We have seen very good traction coming in from smaller cities as well. Fifty per cent of our customers are from smaller cities,” Pandey said. He said CLiQ can reach most of the pincodes faster through its omni-channel route and without investing much in warehouses or fulfilment centres, as the stores act as one. “Our fulfilment cost is less than 50 per cent of that of the competition,” he said, adding that this, along with focus on technology, will lead to profitability and good user experience.

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