Shoppers Stop to invest Rs 60 cr in digitalising stores, eyes 20 pc revenue from digital influence

Retail major Shoppers Stop has said it expects about 20 per cent of its revenues to have digital influence by 2020 as it ramps up efforts to move to an Omnichannel model.
Shoppers Stop, which has 80 outlets across the country, has earmarked about Rs 60 crore for the digitisation of its stores that will offer facilities like contact-less payment as well as a more personalised shopping experience to customers.
“We started our journey in 2015 and have already started rolling out a lot of features that are aimed at enhancing customer experience… By 2020, we expect that 20 per cent of our revenues will have a digital influence from the current levels of about one per cent,” Shoppers Stop CIO Anil Shankar said at the Cisco India Summit 2017.
Shankar explained that it is difficult to quantify contribution from digital revenues as everything today is “influenced by technology” and cited the example of an user buying vouchers online but using them in a retail store.
He added that it is well-established that companies with an omni-channel presence (online and offline) have better footfall than those with just physical presence.
For the quarter ended December 2016, Shoppers Stop posted over 12 per cent rise in total income at Rs 1,011.19 crore from the corresponding quarter of last year.
“We have undertaken a number of transformation activities, which we hope to complete by the third quarter…Our IT spends are focussed on operational expenses, introducing scalable solutions and bringing in transformation,” he said.
As part of the transformation process, Shoppers Stop has partnered global networking giant Cisco to implement the latter’s wireless solution across Shoppers Stop stores in the country. With the Cisco solution, Shoppers Stop has also deployed guest Wi-Fi at its stores.
“We are excited to collaborate with Shoppers Stop as they digitally transform their business, deliver hyper-relevant customer experiences and enhance workforce efficiency to emerge as the retailers of the future,” Cisco India and SAARC President Dinesh Malkani said.
Using Cisco’s solutions, Shoppers Stop will get a single-view dashboard of connected customers, insights into customer behaviour analytics, traffic flow and analytics as well as location-based services for effective in-store marketing and tracking.
It has partnered other firms like IBM as well for its digital transformation roadmap.
Shankar said Shoppers Stop is piloting a number of features across various stores and will roll the successful ones out across the chain. Shoppers Stop has an internal team of about 80 people working on the technology front.
An interesting feature that Shoppers Stop has rolled out is allowing users to make contact-less payment using audio technology.
Launched in partnership with ToneTag, the technology uses audio signals or ‘tone tags’ for data exchange between devices. Payment instructions are transmitted, using a sound signal, through a traditional phone line, without any additional hardware or software requirements or dependencies.