Information Madness

Recently a California-based NRI woman (Hina Saiya) started an online luxury lingire lingerie portal for Indian women called ShopImagine.in. The focus here is Indian urban professional woman. The site will be sourcing luxury lingerie items from multiple sources across Europe, Americas and Asia.

Online shopping is cathing up in India but still its not upto its potential. There are many reasons for this. There are chances of identity theft, lack of internet fraud laws, credit cards are not that widely used etc. But thats a whole different topic that we can go on and on.

Buying electronics is different than buying clothes. When you buy clothes, you basically try it on, get a feel for it etc. Specially women, they don't buy something on the mouse click, they would spend hours in the stores just to buy one pair of shoes so forget about clothes specially lingrie. 

Buying womens lingerie is not that easy task. There are issues like sizes, different clothe material fits differently. ShopImagine does have a No-risk 7 day return policy but 7 days starts from when? the day you purchase it or the day you receive it? Who would pay the return charges? Does anything India gets delivered in 7 days? Would someone in Banglore or Delhi or Kolkata or Ahmedabad be able to return the item in 7 days? The point is, 7 days are too short a period for the return policy.

Luxury lingerie portals work in western countries probably because those portals have thier offline stores. For e.g. Victoria's Secret. They have their stores all across USA where women can go and try it on. Once they know what fits and what not, they can go online and buy it.

Indian women have their minds set. If they are confortable buying thier stuff from one particular place, they would stick to it. This is what I think, ShopImagine.in would work only for men in India who wants to purchase luxury lingerie for their girl friends, fiancée or wives. Chances are that at the end, they would get yelled at by their partners for wrong sizes and it would be returned or kept as a momento.

ShopImagine could have started with their offline stores in metro malls first and then could have gone online. That would have been a different scenario alltogether.

What's your point of view on this? Would luxury lingerie portal work in India?