E-Commerce is definitely a booming business in India nowdays, however a lot of mid-size e-commerce stores are finding it hard to sustain. Recently well known e-store Yebhi.com turned into online shopping aggregator now another shopping portal BeStylish.com also followed the footstep of Yebhi.
BeStylish.com by Smile group used to be an online footwear store earlier even claimed to be India's no.1 online shoe store but it has now transformed itself into an aggregator of products just like Yebhi.com. The website now aggregates lifestyle and fashion products from popular ecommerce websites like Jabong, Myntra and Flipkart and that too all under one roof. Once the shopper has chosen what he or she wants to purchase, the site then redirects them to the respective ecommerce sites to make the payment.
Last year in July, the site had changed to a marketplace model from an inventory based model. The site then started sourcing products directly from offline merchants and sold them on its site without having an inventory of its own. What amazes us more is that Abhishek Lal, who is the co-founder of BeStylish.com, had told Techcircle in an interview that his company would now be focusing and stressing more on the lesser known brands, as compared to the sites brand focused style earlier. This approach seems to have taken a U-turn.
At the time of company’s pivot, the site was also functioning as a facilitator of online sales for lesser known brands and offline traders. The site was acting as a platform between ecommerce marketplaces and merchants just like much popular sites Naaptol, Tradus and eBay etc. Achieving such a business model would have been slightly difficult, considering the possibility that these offline traders could easily sign up with one of these marketplaces at a later stage and then not require BeStylish’s help or assistance at all.
Though the reason behind the company’s move to shift to an aggregation model is still unknown, the recent trend of offline retailers moving to big ecommerce sites like Snapdeal, Flipkart and Amazon India seems to be the most likely reason. Whatever the reason maybe, the shopaholics surely have a huge reason to rejoice as now they can shop from all their favorite ecommerce sites under one roof.
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