Phone Retailers Go One up on
Etailers with
Delivery
The likes of The MobileStore and UniverCell
to offer doorstep delivery within 4 hours by execs who'll also
assist
buyers in getting devices fully operational
Mobile
phone retailers such as The Mobile Store and UniverCell will
offer
delivery within hours along with all the in-store perks, such
as
buybacks and data transfers, to their online customers, in a bid to
beat
their feisty online rivals at their own game.
Top
executives of The Mobile Store, UniverCell, Sangeetha Mobiles
and
Hotspot say they will begin offering guaranteed delivery within four hours
of placing the order, and by a sales
executive who will handhold consumers
till
the new device is fully operational.
“The
online stores have courier guys that deliver, and the person still has
issues
such as phone book migration and SIM cutting in case the new phone
requires
an alternate dimension,“ said Alok Gupta, chief executive at
The
Mobile Store, the country's largest mobile phone retail chain with
over
550 stores across 90 cities.
Besides
selling through their own portals, retailers such as UniverCell
and
HotSpot are also tying up with price comparison engines such as
mysmartprice.com
and junglee.com, which will automatically prompt
the
companies to approach consumers searching for particular smartphones
on
their sites, industry officials said.
Company
executives will contact consumers over the phone, assist them
in
zeroing in on the smartphone they want to buy and deliver it to their
home
within a few hours from stores in the vicinity, they said.
At
present, walk in customers account for around 60% of sales at mobile
retail
chains while the rest comes from shipping or deliverybased sales.
Company
officials say that ratio of that would invert quickly once customers
understand
the promise of delivery .
“But
we need to make noise about it,“ said Subhash Chandra, managing
director
at Sangeetha Mobiles. The Bengaluru-based firm has trialled
home-delivery
in less than two hours in the city , Chennai and Hyderabad,
through
its portal Shopno47.com, and is now trying to bring down the time
to
less than an hour, Chandra said.
Krishna
Kumar, chief executive officer at Spice Hotspot, said, “Our trained
staff
will go with the phone within four hours, set it up and transfer all data
onto
the new device, for free. Online retailers can't do this.“ Spice Hotspot
has
300 stores across the country, out of which 120 are in its headquarters
Delhi.
Chennai-based
UniverCell plans to offer buyback of an old smartphone
in
exchange of a new one and finance schemes at your doorstep within
a
couple of hours of order placement.
Gupta
of The Mobile Store said the Essar Group firm's sales executives
will
carry add-on products like protective covers, scratch guards,
SIM
alteration, and theft or damage insurance, that could be cross sold in
bundled
packages when they go for delivery . The focus would remain on
selling
smartphones because although it forms 17% of volume, it accounts
for
30% of the revenue.
Mobile
retailers hope that this strategy will help them get a slight premium
on
product prices that can boost their profitability through sales of
ancillaries.
Mobile
phones are among the most sold electronics products in the country's
booming
online retail space where marketplaces such as Flipkart, Snapdeal
and
Amazon often offer deep discounts to attract consumers, a price
traditional
retail outlets cannot match due to their higher cost structure.
The
Retailers Association of India recently filed a petition in the Delhi
High
Court, seeking level playing field with online retail on foreign direct
investment
(FDI) rules, arguing that most online market places are operating
just
like retailers with their own warehouses and logistics operations.
At
the same time, traditional retailers are looking for ways to differentiate
themselves
in the online space.
Nonetheless,
the industry agrees there is room for everyone.India has a
market
of nearly one billion devices with only a tenth smartphones.
The
remaining are expected to be replaced over a three-year period.
|
||
|
Deepali
Gupta & Gulveen Aulakh
|
||
|
|
||
ET1JUN15
No comments:
Post a Comment