major factors in influencing adoption of e-commerce. These factors to a large extent also play out for apparel e-tailing.
Increasingly consumers feel stressed to drive to a crowded mall and navigate through it to buy a garment. Rather, they prefer the convenience of shopping at home and getting the goods home-delivered. For them, this allows comparison of designs and prices at their leisure, and in the privacy of their homes, without having to deal with either hovering sales staff or the rush of the stores.
The Internet ' s ubiquity gives online brands the capability to reach all Indians, even those with no access to an online payment facility, as most brands offer Cash-on-Delivery( COD) options, offering them the luxury of seeing the product before making payment for it. Infact, COD has been a one of the big factors for online retailing to take off in its second innings in India( first being in the year 2000).
1.2 CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
Indian consumers are very different from consumers of developed countries. The online retail industry has come up with some very innovative practices to tackle these differences in behavior and hence helped the industry grow. When e-tailing began in Indian in the early 2000s, very few people had credit / debit cards. This presented the problem of payment and hence limited the growth. However, when cash-on-delivery was introduced, the industry witnessed an exponential growth.
Indian consumers also like to physically inspect the item they want to buy before purchasing it. This is more prevalent and applicable to the apparel segment than any other segment. This has given rise to the phenomenon of show-rooming. In a comScore survey, 12 % of the respondents had heard of show-rooming. About 1 in 10 had aided awareness of the phenomenon.
Show rooming is the phenomenon in which a customer first visits a brick-and-mortar store to see a product but purchases the product online. Shoppers may intend from the start of their product search to purchase the product online, or may decide to purchase online after viewing the item at the store.
In the comScore survey, 35 % of the respondents had
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engaged in show-rooming while 43 % of millennials had engaged in the same. 6 in 10 respondents say that they decided to purchase online after visiting a store while 32 % do it intentionally. Not surprisingly, 43 % of the respondents engaged in show-rooming for apparels, second only to consumer electronics with 60 % of the respondents. The major reason cited by the respondents
Exhibit 2
Top reasons for consumer engaging in showrooming
Prices were better online
Planned to buy online but wanted to check the item in store first
Items were out of stock
Would rather have items shipped to home than take it back with me
Was not convenient to buy in person at at that time
Source: comScore. com
( 72 %) for engaging in show-rooming is that products purchased from online are cheaper. The other major reasons are shown in Exhibit 2.
These statistics clearly provide a consumer insight which the apparel e-tailers in India are looking forward to exploit. Multi-brand retailer, Myntra. com recently launched the“ Try and Buy” campaign. Zovi. com launched a virtual show room. ShoppersStop. com, Momandme. com and Caratelane. com follow the clickand-mortar format of retailing. The retailers want to give the consumers a“ touch and feel” experience. These are their efforts to cash in on the Indian consumer behaviour and show-rooming. Let us briefly examine how these have worked out for the retailers.
1.3 MYNTRA. COM
Myntra. com is an online shopping retailer of fashion and casual lifestyle products, headquartered in Bangalore. They started off as sellers of personalized products like t- shirts, but now have become a multi-brand apparel and accessories e-tailer.
In June 2012, Myntra launched its third campaign“ Try and Buy”. It was created by Taproot, the communication emphasizes the benefits of buying online, and is titled ' Real life mein aisa hota hai kya '. Myntra offers free shipping, cash on delivery, 30 day return & 24 hours
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dispatch. All these benefits are associated with in-person buying with the incentive of low prices.
As a result of this, Myntra. com recorded a substantial increase in daily page views. Figure – 1 compares Myntra. com and Jabong. com daily page views( percentage) over a period of two years.
10 %
10 %
14 %
26 %
41 %
0 % 5 % 10 % 15 % 20 % 25 % 30 % 35 % 40 % 45 %
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