—CT News Bureau
New Delhi, April 17: WGSN, global foresight business specializing in consumer, fashion and design trends, has partnered with Indian retailers and e-tailers on WGSN INstock. WGSN INstock is an online retail analytics system that provides fashion retailers with fast, in-market intelligence to inform business-critical buying and merchandising decisions.
WGSN INstock tracks more than 40 million products from 12,000 retailers in UK, US, Australia and Spain and will also include retailers from India starting April 2015. The first retailer to be added to WGSN INstock is YepMe, an online shopping company.
India is widely considered as the last big e-commerce market, as explosive sales of smartphones give Internet access to hundreds of millions of its untapped shoppers. Investors ploughed in more than $4 billion in Internet businesses last year, and that amount is expected to be significantly higher in 2015.
Dan Cotton, Executive Vice President, WGSN Asia-Pacific stated, “The US$ 585 billion Indian retail market is expected to become worth US$ 1 trillion by 2020, out of which approximately 10 percent is fashion and apparel retail alone. This exponential growth of retail in India makes it one of the most important markets for WGSN INstock. With WGSN INstock, retailers gain the much needed insight into their business and global trends, which is essential to survive competition and customer’s expectations in today’s fashion world.”
“As fast-fashion becomes ever faster, the need for on-demand data to be in the hands of decision makers becomes ever more critical. Therefore, WGSN is essential for retailers to make intelligent business decisions with accurate data and respond quickly to mark-down opportunities. It helps retailers to capture market share by identifying future best-sellers, opportunities in pricing architecture and time your product drops to maximize revenue. WGSN INstock also helps retailers in benchmarking the financial health of their competitors,” he further added.
WGSN INstock provides in-market intelligence to inform business-critical buying and merchandising decisions. The system is intuitive to use and has been designed to dovetail exactly into the workflows of buyers, merchandisers as well as designers, marketers and C-suite.
The company has a customer base of over 75,000 users across 4,000 global businesses including M&S, Next, Topman, H&M, Puma, Primark, Asda George, Mr Price (South Africa), Woolworths (South Africa), Schuh, Sweaty Betty, Ted Baker, John Lewis, Dorothy Perkins, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Club Monaco, Lee, Levis, Coach, Kate Spade, Victoria’s Secret, Apple, Samsung, P&G, Coca Cola, Starbucks and Diageo.
E-commerce is a viable business in India, although online retailers may take as long as five years or more to become profitable and could be overvalued currently, according to a new report by the Indian financial services unit of UBS Group AG.
Online retail sales could touch anywhere between $48 billion and $60 billion by 2020 from $4.47 billion last year, helped by explosive growth in smartphone penetration and the resultant increase in mobile commerce, UBS analysts Gautam Chhaochharia and Shaleen Kumar wrote in the report.
Sales in this case refers to gross merchandise value (GMV), which means value of goods sold on a site before accounting for discounts and product returns.