ZopNow's parent company ZN Retail launches ShopStr, becomes the first site to sell iPhone 6 in India

ZN Retail, the parent company of ZopNow launched ShopStr.com yesterday. ShopStr is set up as an online platform that offers products at competitive prices, and is the first online store to sell the iPhone 6 in India. ShopStr has tied up with suppliers across the world to bring well-established products at competitive prices to consumers in India and the iPhone 6 is the first product on ShopStr. It has bundled the iPhone 6 with a 1-year ShopStr warranty plan, coupled with a 30-day replacement guarantee for manufacturing defects.

Why ShopStr?

There are a zillion phones out there in the market and many a times, it becomes hard to make a choice. One of the biggest reasons behind starting ShopStr is to solve this 'Paradox of Choice'. They write on the site,

Shopstr was started to solve this problem, and make 'choice' a weapon rather than a liability. Having gone through these pangs of a shopper trying to make a (relatively) high value purchase, we realised that choice can be harnessed to make decision-making easier for customers by means of presenting the available information in a complete and easily consumable manner, and worked hard to make it available to other shoppers in the online world.

The Bigger Picture

ZN Retail's ZopNow (online grocery delivery with a 3 hour delivery promise) has been their mainstay and also the primary business for which they raised money. But as it pans out, the ZopNow platform was always built with the possibility of translation in mind. "While building ZopNow, we have consciously built it as a modular platform which will help other retailers to come online in a very seamless manner. This platform will take care of all aspects of building a scalable e-commerce business, all the way from marketing to consumers to customer relationship management to inventory management and last-mile delivery," says Mukesh Singh, CEO of ZopNow.

They did this first with Hypercity, where ZopNow made Hypercity's inventory available to ZopNow customers. And now ShopStr. "This is proof that the platform works. On ShopStr, we are adding other high-end smartphones, as we speak, and will expand into other consumer electronic categories as well," says Mukesh.

Tathagata, the product man at ZN Retail tells us that the platform has already sold a few iPhones and they're expecting a surge now. ZopNow is focused on Bangalore but ShopStr has opened up delivery to the main metros in the country and will gradually deliver to customers across the country. With the iPhone 6, it has a 1-year ShopStr warranty plan coupled with a 30-day replacement guarantee for manufacturing defects and they plans to keep the same policy in place for the other products on ShopStr.

Talking of the platform, Tathagata tells us that it is too early to comment on whether they'd be licensing out the technology or taking some other route but they're open to all ideas and collaborations. This is an interesting space for ZN Retail to venture out into and it opens a lot more possibilities.

Website: www.ShopStr.com