Aditya Birla group's online fashion store to offer on-spot alteration service

Abof.com, the online fashion store owned by Aditya Birla group is planning to launch an on-spot alteration service in Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Commenting on the same, Chief Operating Officer, Sukanta Das, said

The initiative will help us reduce returns and drive customer satisfaction for alteration. This is among the many value added services we provide to customers including a 3D trial room and on-spot exchange of apparel due to size issues.

The firm is partnering with YourTailor.com in Bengaluru and looks forward to partner with other similar ventures in the future. Abof.com is also planning to expand this service to Pune, Mumbai and Delhi-NCR. According to Sukanta, size and fitting issues owe to one fifth of their total returns.

The service is free for customers at the moment. abof.com is not the only player offering this service. Myntra offers a similar service to shoppers at a minimum cost of Rs 50 while Craftsvilla allows its users to get unstitched material stitched through its network of tailors.

Launched in October 2015, the fashion portal delivers across 7500 pincodes with an average ticket or order size of Rs 1000. The platform plans to have 20,000 products listed in the next few months.

The company said that half of these products will be from the Group’s companies, while others will be sourced externally which will be curated by abof.com.

Other conglomerates

Earlier in May 2016, the Tata’s entered the e-commerce battlefield with their online store CliQ. The crowded space of fashion e-commerce saw participation from the Reliance Industries as well with the launch of its online fashion platform Ajio. Recently, Arvind Ltd also went live with their omni-channel platform NNNow.com. In September 2015, Mahindra group expressed their interest to launch their e-commerce venture M2ALL.com.

Most recent player to join is the government which announced its plans to go live with its online portal for official procurements and services, next year.

Further, according to a recent study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the e-commerce market in India is expected to double to over Rs 2 lakh crores by December 2016.