Shoppers Stop to sell books, food online next fiscal

The organised retail pioneer in India, Shoppers Stop is gradually moving towards the omni-channel approach of retailing. It is planning to start selling books and food by the next fiscal. This comes after the brand has announced to open an electronic commerce platform around Diwali for its range of clothes, perfumes and accessories.

Following up on its scheduled introduction of omni-channel web operations in October, Shoppers Stop would take its grocery mart HyperCity and book-and-toy store Crossword online in the next fiscal. Managing director Govind Shrikhande said Hyper-City online will be available in markets where it has stores that will fulfill the orders. Trials began in Mumbai and will be extended to Bengaluru this year. Crossword, however, will have a national e-commerce footprint. “Since we have already invested Rs 60 crore on the technology backbone for Shoppers Stop ecommerce venture, the incremental investment for taking HyperCity and Crossword online will be not much,” said Shrikhande. He said the group is currently formalising the project details for these two ventures. There are at present 19 HyperCity stores in 10 cities, and 50 Crossword outlets in 15 cities. Both the retail formats operate as subsidiaries of Shoppers Stop. Shrikhande said the HyperCity e-commerce venture will serve the purpose of weekly top-up shopping, and offer exclusive selection and products.

“We expect almost 10% of our sales for Shoppers Stop to be generated from e-commerce in three years. We will at most have two season old merchandise on the platform under discount as compared to 3-4 season old on other fashion portals,” said Shrikhande.

The group is also targeting break-even and profitability of HyperCity from the next fiscal and is driving this by rationalising store sizes, reducing total retail space from 15 lakh square feet to 13 lakh square feet. The Rs 1,000 crore food and grocery retail business has accumulated losses of Rs 400 crore.