Aditya Birla Group to launch online Pantaloons store

“E-tailing is the way forward, it reflects the new India. It’s about new lifestyles, new spending patterns, it’s about new family structures. And we want to be in that space,” said Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman of the Aditya Birla group last year when speculations were rife about the retail group’s entry into ecommerce.

Although the time frame was left hanging then, it had been confirmed that the group was exploring options to enter the ecommerce space. And now we hear the Aditya Birla group is taking their department store Pantaloons also online, in addition to its existing online portal trendin.

“In the coming weeks, consumers will be able to buy our products through pantaloons.com,” says Shital Mehta, chief executive of the Aditya Birla’s unit that the Group had acquired from Future Group.

Existing portal trendin already has products from Pantaloons and major brands sold by the group like Allen Solly, Louis Philip and so on. Pantaloons online will be a separate ecommerce site, although the back end logistics will be handled by the Trendin team and customers would also get redirected to Trendin for certain products.

Why the redirection to online+offline now?

“A lot of customers want to buy offline as well as online and this is just to ensure we give them a seamless shopping,” Mehta said. So loyalty card holders of the offline store will enjoy the same benefits when they shop online too.

Aditya Birla group is not the only one rushing to ride the ecommerce wave. In the past few months, we have heard about other established retail giants like Future Group, Shoppers Stop, Lifestyle and Spencer’s retail either planning their ecommerce entry or already selling online through the marketplaces.

Is this proof that even the age-old retail giants are threatened by the onset and popularity of online retail?