Myntra Banks On Kirana Stores To Push Sales In Smaller Cities 

Myntra, India's largest online fashion retailer, is banking on offline retailers to push sales in smaller cities during its annual year-end discount season that kicked off today.

The company signed up around 3,600 mom-and-pop stores, almost five-fold compared to last year, to speed up deliveries to customers in tier-2 and 3 cities, Ananth Narayanan, chief executive officer of Myntra and Jabong, told BloombergQuint in an interview. “We are aiming 25 percent faster deliveries this sale season and kirana stores help us to do that as they are local and know the area and customers.”

Myntra, owned by Flipkart Internet Pvt., kicked off its seventh edition of annual four-day offer season, called ‘End of Reason Sale', giving discounts of up to 60 percent and aims to add 5 lakh new customers. It's eyeing a growth of 50 percent over the year-ago event.

To ensure faster deliveries, it introduced Myntra Fashion Trucks in select cities such as Lucknow, Indore and Jaipur to engage customers and drive awareness. Together with kirana store tie-ups, that will help boost contribution from such centres to 60 percent of overall sales during the period, Narayanan said.

The e-commerce company also relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to predict what customers want and forward-deploy products accordingly.

It expects at least 30 million customers on its platforms during the sale, with about 75 million shopping sessions, he said. That will help the company achieve operational profitability by March 2018 and is looking to clock $1.2 billion (around Rs 8,000 crore) in gross sales this year.

The online fashion portal introduced its first offline store of one of its private labels, Roadster, in March this year. It's looking to add around 10-15 offline such outlets by the end of next year.