Apps, websites, and a wallet. India’s retail king plans to beat startups at their game

Photo credit: Alexas_Fotos

“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.”

What Harry Potter fans must know from reading J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular book The Goblet of Fire,  Kishore Biyani is learning from experience.

Biyani, chairman of one of India’s biggest retailers, and credited as the father of modern retail in the country, has long flip-flopped on his stance on the country’s booming ecommerce industry – ranging from doomsday calls and battle cries to what looks like a final acceptance.

The man, who once publicly challenged Flipkart and its rivals’ selling strategies, eventually ended up opening a store on Amazon, and then went on to buy online furniture retailer FabFurnish from Rocket Internet.

On Wednesday, the 54-year-old retail veteran sketched out his plans to take his traditional shopping empire online, as competition from startups keeps building the heat.

Apart from running FabFurnish, the company plans to relaunch its mobile app for eZone, the group’s retail chain for electronic products, soon.

Those plans are to be followed by the launch of an online transactional website for Big Bazaar, India’s answer to Walmart, and the chain that brought Biyani the epithet of “father of modern retail in India.” Once that goes live, online grocery app BigBasket will have trouble on their hands.

See: Here’s why BigBasket is killing it in India while the others struggle

Biyani, however, is pegging all of this as an “omnichannel drive,” meaning he wants to tie online and offline retailing together, like Target or Walmart.

“The omnichannel strategy was always a stated objective in terms of how can we increase the capacity of our stores using technology… all the final capability is just around the corner,” says Biyani.

But semantics aside, what the offline retail champion is doing is essentially joining the online brigade.

There will, subsequently, also be apps for some of Future Group’s other brands as well. Apart from grocery and electronics, the company’s chains include multiple apparel chains, a gourmet food chain, and a sports chain.

If you can’t beat ’em

Wallet on the way

FabFurnish’s future