Fashion is a key segment in online retail, but owning a fashion portal isn’t a cakewalk

Fashion is one of the most popular segments in online retail in India; however, some of the e-commerce ventures operating in this category are finding it hard to carry on with their portals, because of lack of funds from investors.

These portals have been unsuccessful to raise money or find buyers, which is why they are facing a dearth of cash, opting to either close or scale back their operations.

For example, Freecultr, the Sequoia Capital-funded e-commerce company Freecultr, has shut down its website, two people aware of the matter told ET. The company was in talks with Arvind Group for a possible sell-off, but looks like the deal couldn’t get through.

However, Sandeep Singh, cofounder of Freecultr, said that the website is currently not operational because there is a "technical error". He added that, "I can't comment on shutdown."

A look at the company’s social media tells us that while the Facebook page was last updated in March, the Twitter handle had its last update in April.

Zovi, which was backed by SAIF Partners and Tiger Global, has also stopped selling directly via its website, forcing buyers to go to Flipkart and Amazon to buy the products.

"Sorry for interruption. We are shifting our warehouses. We will be back soon. You can still continue to keep directing our products at Amazon and Flipkart," says the website error. Here as well, the authorities declined shutting down the business.

"At present we are not selling directly via the portal but we are selling through our marketplace partners," Manish Chopra, CEO of Zovi said. Social media pages of Zovi have been waiting for an update since long.

Even though the online fashion segment is supposed to grow to $20 billion by 2020 from the present $2 billion, it’s the smaller online fashion retailers that are struggling to keep alive.

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