Naaptol Adopts Franchise Model To Make An Offline Foray

Naaptol Online Shopping, which owns and runs TV shopping and ecommerce platform Naaptol.com, will soon have an offline presence too. The company has allocated $1.5 Mn (INR 10 Cr) towards the establishment of 100 stores across the country over the next year.

According to a report, the company has already opened its first store in Thrissur. The next four stores in Indore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Jaipur respectively, will be opened by March 2018.

Commenting on the development, Manu Agarwal, founder and CEO of Naaptol reportedly said, “We have been getting a lot more demand than what we can serve just on the television medium, so spreading offline made sense. We will look at how trends evolve through our five stores by March and then plan the rollout for the next leg of our offline expansion.”

In an attempt to keep the costs to a minimum, Naaptol has adopted a franchise model for its offline expansion plans. Agarwal further believes that this could give a huge boost to Naaptol’s volume growth and customer base.

He expects to double its customer base of 10 Mn in a year. The company is targeting 500 stores in the next three to four years.

It expects offline sales to contribute 30% of its total revenue within the next three to five years, and accrue monthly revenues of around $31 Mn ( INR 200 Cr).

Founded in 2008, Naaptol runs TV shopping and ecommerce platform Naaptol.com. At present, the company already caters to 26,000 pin codes of India and has been onboarding 1 Mn new customers every month.

Naaptol processes nearly 40,000 orders a day and operates seven television shopping channels in multiple languages along with its app and website.

In August 2017, the company was looking to expand and decentralise its fulfilment centres. It invested $1 Mn to open two fulfilment centres in Hyderabad and Delhi.  The company’s turnover in 2016-17 stood at $ 93 Mn (INR 630 Cr).

In November 2015, the company raised about $51.7 Mn (INR 343 Cr.) in equity funding from existing investors including Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co., New Enterprise Associates, Canaan Partners and Silicon Valley Bank.

Earlier in April 2015, the company had raised about $20.5 Mn (INR 136 Cr.).

Online To Brick-and-Mortar Stores In India

Naaptol isn’t the first ecommerce player to expand its operations to an offline model. Major players like Flipkart, LensKart, Nykaa are among those that have already explored the offline market.

Flipkart-owned Myntra recently announced its plans to open beauty and wellness offline stores. LensKart has already been betting on offline stores through its 400 retail touchpoints.

With a huge user base already present on its platform, it has to be seen how soon Naaptol is able to fulfil its aim of doubling its customer count through its offline presence.