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Indiatimes Unveils Nokia Shop; How Relevant Is Shop-in-Shop Retail Concept Online?

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Nokia India has joined hands with Indiatimes Shopping to launch its online store- NokiaShop.

Nokia Shop has been launched on Indiatimes sub-domain, to sell entire range of Nokia devices – including smartphones, dual SIM phones, touch and type, QWERTY and touch phones.

According to Viral Oza, director- marketing, Nokia India, "Through our association with Indiatimes Shopping, we will be able to offer a superior online shopping experience to our consumer by giving them an opportunity to buy their favourite mobile device directly from Nokia."

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Gautam Sinha, director technology and e-commerce head said, "We have made significant investments in warehousing and last mile delivery to give a better shopping experience to our customers."

Like any other e-commerce portal, consumers have the option of making the payment through credit card, debit card and cash on delivery.

Additionally, they have the option of converting their payment amount into interest-free EMIs spread over three or six months.

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Apart from Nokia phones, Nokia accessories will be made available to the consumers within the next few weeks.

This appears to be the first among a set of sub-domain brand channels that Indiatimes may open on its shopping site. Indiatimes shopping site already has a teaser section which says Shop by Brands- Coming Soon. It lists brands such as Durex, Epson, Florista, IBM, Funskool, Godrej Interio among others in the roster.

The concept is interesting and takes a leaf out of offline retail stores where brands play with shop-in-shop concept marking a part of the store exclusively for a particular brand or a set of brands from a single company or group. Just like the offline model, the deal does not stop Indiatimes from selling handsets of other brands in its main shopping website.

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However, we are wondering what differentiating factor does this new initiative hold? We did a random check on certain products on the new Nokia Shop. Given the special association, we expected Nokia Shop to offer handsets cheaper than some other e-tailers. But, Nokia's newer smartphones Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 happened to have the same price tag as those available on Flipkart.

The shop-in-shop concept does gives a better presence for the seller. But will the offline model work online? What do you think?


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