Snapdeal to reach 13 million households with TV Commerce

After getting strong footholds in consumer Internet space, Delhi based eCommerce marketplace has announced its debut in TV commerce with 50:50 joint venture with DEN, one of India’s biggest television distribution companies.

With this Snapdeal aims to create a multi-nodal electronic shopping avenue for customers. The channel is currently available for viewers on channel number 132 on DEN cable network and will be extended to other cable and DTH networks in the course of the next six months.

DEN Networks reaches about 13 million households in over 200 cities across 13 states in the country. Snapdeal will leverage this robust distribution network of DEN to provide customers easy access to the wide assortment of products across home, lifestyle and electronics categories with great value deals.

image credit: ShutterStockSpeaking about the partnership, Mr. Kunal Bahl, Co-founder and CEO Snapdeal.com said, “Innovation lies at the heart of Snapdeal.com and with this initiative we are taking yet another step to fulfill our promise of providing accessibility to the best products at best prices to consumers across India. We are delighted to partner with a likeminded brand like DEN Networks which enjoys massive reach and brand loyalty across the entire country and especially in smaller towns of India. India is a country with many heterogeneous segments of consumers, and we believe that by reaching 150 million households with 600 million people that have a TV, we can create another revolution through TV Commerce.”

As a first time initiative by any online marketplace, DEN Snapdeal TV-shop was launched as a pilot in September last year. The channel has been receiving tremendous response from the customers with a massive growth rate of 200% on monthly basis since inception.

The pilot was launched in select geographies basis the availability of the network, offering products in primarily three categories namely, Home & Kitchen, Electronics and Fashion & Lifestyle.

The move from Snapdeal is surprising as we didn’t see any eCommerce powerhouses leveraging TV to reach consumers in tier II & III cities in recent years. HomeShop18 and Naaptol have been evangelizing TV Commerce from some time. TV Commerce offers reach to females, especially housewives, in tier II and III cities where Internet shopping is not popular.

For player like Snapdeal which recently raised $627 million funding from the Softbank group, TV commerce can bring scale for which all eCommerce majors are fighting for.

To get quick scale, last year the eBay funded company had tied-up with Tata Value Homes to sell flats. Besides this, it partnered with Hero MotoCorp Ltd for selling two-wheelers, and attracted users attention with 700 bikes sold within 72 hours.

In August this year, Snapdeal entered into a strategic and exclusive partnership with Tata Homes for selling apartments by the real estate major on its site. Additionally, the company also floated Agri Store for farmers in December 2014.