ShopClues sharpens focus on fashion, to launch exclusive brands in the category

ShopClues, one of India’s first and largest online marketplaces, has shifted its focus on building fashion as a fast-growing category.
Presently, India’s apparel and lifestyle market is a US $92 billion industry. However, according to recent reports, only 2 per cent of that is currently online. This is the fastest growing category and reaches 24 per cent of online consumers in India. So, Shopclues has exponentially scaled up our offerings in this category including clothing, jewelry, fashion accessories and footwear.
Director & Business Head of Fashion at ShopClues, Ritika Taneja told Indiaretailing, “We have sharpened our focus on the Fashion category in a major way in FY 2017. We have curated a huge assortment of trendy and affordable products to ensure Indians across all nooks and corners of the country get an opportunity to look good everyday. We are majorly catering to the fashion needs of real Bharat and our selection, pricing, customer experience and communication are relevant to the needs of our audience in Tier II cities and beyond.”
She further added, “We will be launching several exclusive brands in categories such as women’s clothing and footwear in this year.”
ShopClues has a strong base of over 5 lakh sellers, of which 2.5 lakh merchants are in the fashion category.
With various services offered to merchants ranging from digitization to advertising and brand building, ShopClues works with over 2 lakh merchants in the fashion category alone and has an assortment of about 4 million products including craft-based products, regional products as well as branded products. 80 per cent of the merchants are SMEs and the remaining 20 per cent are regional brands, mid-tier and national brands.
“The merchant ecosystem is being strengthened through Active Account Management and various initiatives such as Business Guru and Adzone where merchants are getting empowered to grow their business,” revealed Taneja.
Shopclues offers trendy and affordable products with an great customer experience. This well-defined strategy has helped the brand in bringing and retaining consumers on the platform. Apart from this, the brand is also going aggressive with its promotion strategy to expand the user base.”
Taneja said, “Initiatives such as Surety program are aimed to increase the overall trust level of the platform so as to increase the retention of our customers and enable high repeats.”
About 50 per cent of the total revenue comes from fashion categories, which, in addition to apparel, include accessories, handbags, and footwear to name a few.