ear ago, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos had listed fashion as one of the biggest potentials for the US online giant in India. The segment is already among the top three categories, growing five-fold since last year, for the e-commerce marketplace although rival Flipkart, especially after its Myntra acquisition, dominates the fashion segment.
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Mayank Shivam, fashion vertical head at Amazon India, in an interview to ET, said the marketplace is confident of taking to lead in India's booming online fashion market. Edited excerpts:
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Has Amazon overcome its late-mover disadvantage for fashion segment in the country?
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Fashion for the past 12 months has consistently been among the top three categories. Now, in top three we have electronics, media (books) and fashion. In the fashion segment alone, we have seen 5x growth from what we were in last Diwali. For the Great Indian Festive Sale, which ended on 17th of this month, the top three categories were consumer electronics, apparels and home and kitchen. Under fashion, our top categories apparels, shoes and watches contribute to more than 90% of the units.
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Did you notice any change in the way people shop online for fashion products in the last few months?
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Yes, a couple of things. One, in terms of average selling price we are trending better than the goals that we had set. For instance, in watches we are trending close to 20% higher than the goal we had set for the festive season. And most of the demand is coming from Tier II and Tier III cities. In fashion we are seeing mobile as the key form of engagement. Hence, we are now mobile first in a lot of our content pages because we have realized that customers are using us not only to buy products but also to consume fashion content.
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How dependent are you on mobile for your sales?
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Now, in fashion, we have close to 60% sales coming fro mobile. We want to be a fashion destination and that is what we are building on. Mobile is where customers are going but we are very clear that we want to serve all customers. We will be present everywhere and let our customers choose. But we are investing in building content and expanding the team.
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What are the initiatives you have taken to push sales in the category?
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We are launching stores on our site. We have launched some specific stores for Amazon fashion itself. There is 'Craft in India' store where, we have 3,500 products from 11 regions directly sourced from craftsmen, weavers and artisans. For us it is a very important part of investing into the fashion ecosystem, where we take some of these local crafts and bring them closer to customers. Also, we have launched an international shoe store where we have about nine exclusive international brands such as British Knights.
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read more: www.queeniebridaldress.co.uk
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