Online grocery Zopnow to enter online fashion & lifestyle segment

One of the top players in the online grocery space, Zopnow is now looking to enter fashion and lifestyle sector.

Zopnow works with big hypermarkets such as K Raheja Corp group’s ‘Hypercity’ and Aditya Birla Retail’s ‘More’ to deliver groceries across cities like Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Gurgaon. Through their association with K Raheja, Zopnow has gained access to the multinational’s other retail chain, namely fashion and lifestyle store – Shoppersstop and bookstore – Crossword.

Chief executive of Zopnow, Mukesh Singh also divulged they are also working out a deal with other retail outlets and brands without going into any specifics.

Online fashion retail a profitable avenue

Mukesh Singh said, “We believe many customers will appreciate quick delivery. We are ready in terms of access to inventory and delivery network. We are waiting for the crazy discounts to come down to sanity. We definitely want to diversify. There is no doubt on that as it is the next step forward for the business.”

Online apparel & fashion is a flourishing market, which offers etailers a healthy margin of 30-40%. On the other hand, e-grocery gets them a margin of 10-12%. The online retail segment is expected to turn into a $2.8-billion industry by 2016 as per an Accel Patners report.

With the $10 million (Rs. 62 crore) that Zopnow raised in April, the e-grocery player can effectively scale up and expand to other sectors.

Will grocery take a backseat?

No. Zopnow founder has no plans to move away from grocery, which is on a growth spree. In fact, they plan to add 15 more cities, including Ahmedabad, Chennai, Chandigarh and Kolkata by the end of the year with the help of More and HyperCity, besides other supermarket chains. This move to fashion etail is merely a way to expand their reach, a strategy that has been and is still being adopted by many ecommerce portals such as Paytm, Ola, Amazon and Uber.