Online retailer Flipkart announced a strategic partnership with three of the country’s largest home retail brands—Home Town (Future group), HomeStop (Shoppers Stop) and @Home to sell home decor items.
“The partnerships will introduce a whole new range of products from these retail brands—adding to Flipkart’s existing portfolio of 1000+ brands with seven lakhs home products,” Flipkart said.
Future Group is India’s largest modern retail company. @Home is a furniture chain owned by Nilkamal.
“This association brings together best-in-class products from top home retailers backed by Flipkart’s robust ecommerce capabilities to the end customer. From furnishing to DIY tools and homecare to décor customers can now access an exhaustive range of products from these top-notch brands and their private labels.”
While these retailers have offline presence in key markets and a few online channels, the association helps them tap into Flipkart’s expanding consumer base across geographies, the ecommerce player added.
“These new partnerships also enrich Flipkart’s product range, giving customers more variety to choose from and reach to some of Indian’s leading brands.”
The tie-up can be seen as a big coup for Flipkart, as these retail chains are not otherwise big fans of e-commerce, which threatens their main business. Flipkart was recently overtaken by Amazon in terms of total number of visitors from India.
Amazon, Flipkart’s biggest competitor, is also aggressively looking for tie-ups and partners.
The move will be bad news for specialized furniture and home decor ecommerce retailers such as Urban Ladder, Fabfurnish and Pepperfry.
To bring in a diverse range of products, Flipkart plans to partner with several other retailers across categories too. This would help Flipkart offer an array of products on a single online platform.
Ankit Nagori – Chief Business Officer, Flipkart, commented on this partnership saying, “Ever since the category launch early this year, we have noticed a consistent rise in demand for home products. The combination of the best-of-home-brands and our distribution and technology expertise will surely be a bonus for our expanding customers, across India. We look forward to many more similar tie-ups across categories in the future.”
Manish Parekh, Executive Director, @Home said “With the rising shift of consumers towards the online space, Flipkart has definitely capitalized the space well and has become the preferred shopping destination of online consumers.. In the future, we look forward to incorporate omni channel strategy which will help us optimize our inventory levels and also offer multiple delivery options to consumers.”