The festive season is well and truly on, for eastern India where Durga Puja is the centre of the festivities, some may argue that the major shopping season is over. For the rest of India, it would peak close to Diwali. For a substantial part of my career in retail, this used to be "the time of the year". In Bengal, close to 45% of the annual sales target was parked to the period between September to November.
Now, the festive buying story has changed, and traditional retail appears not to have responded well to the changing buying behaviour of the Indian consumer.
Influence of the #Amazon's and the #Flipkart's in inducing this change is unquestionable. However, I feel offline retail has itself to blame for the customers moving online.
Organised retail in India commands only 12% market share of offline retail as per IBEF; this includes the likes of #RelianceRetail, #ShoppersStop, #Westside, #Pantaloons, #FutureRetail and #MaxFashion. The rest 88% is still with traditional retail. For people complaining about the deep discounting and predatory tactics adopted by etailers, the simple first step would be taking up the 10-year challenge and find out what they are doing differently. Post In LinkedIn Featured Stories
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