Mumbai: Tata Unistore, a Tata group business venture, on Friday launched an ecommerce venture as it seeks to cash in on rising purchasing power in a market dominated by deep-pocketed international retailers and startups backed by global tech investors.
The group said that Tata Cliq will offer consumers a new shopping experience in apparel, electronics and footwear categories.
Over the next few months, the plan is to expand the offering by adding many more categories, brands and exciting features, Tata Unistore said in a statement here.
Tata said its focus was profit margins and unit economics, and not just growing sales via discounts.
"We don't want to get into the discount wars, we want to serve customers with great products and build a sustainable business," said Chief Executive Ashutosh Pandey of Tata Unistore, parent of the operator of Tata Cliq.
To keep costs in check, Pandey said Tata would not use its money to establish a large number of warehouses like other ecommerce players have done, and would instead build inventory networks around existing store locations owned by group partners.
The group, whose businesses include steel production, tea packaging, information technology services and automobiles, has bet on new businesses in recent years with mixed success.
Its retail businesses including sellers of gold ornaments, sunglasses, apparel and electronics have successfully expanded, but its mobile phone venture Tata Docomo is a marginal player.
The Indian conglomerates only lately entered the fray. Reliance Industries Ltd started an online apparel shop last month, while Aditya Birla Group and Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd recently launched online retail platforms.
Over the past few years, e-commerce in India has been growing at a faster rate than brick-and-mortar retail.
According to a Goldman Sachs report released last year, the e-commerce market will account for 2.5 per cent of Indias gross domestic product by 2030, growing 15 times and reaching USD 300 billion. The current size of e-commerce is USD 20 billion.
