Nearly 18 months after acquiring Exclusively.com, Snapdeal will shut the online platform for premium and luxury fashion goods, three people familiar with the matter said.
As Snapdeal looks to aggressively cut costs and conserve cash in a slow funding environment, the company is closely examining the investments it has made during the last three to four years.
While Exclusively will cease to exist as an independent platform, Snapdeal plans to keep the category live under Snapdeal fashion. Most of Exclusively’s existing employees will be absorbed in Snapdeal, while the rest will be asked to leave, said the people mentioned above, on the condition of anonymity.
Exclusively did close to about 150-200 orders per day with an average ticket size of about Rs12,000-20,000, one of the three people cited above said. The website will be kept live for another 30-60 days but will not allow users to buy products; traffic will be directed to Snapdeal’s website, said the second person mentioned above.
Snapdeal did not respond to Mint’s queries regarding the development by the time this report was filed.
The news comes in less than a month after Exclusively launched its mobile app, revamped its existing web platform and unveiled its first advertisement.
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Snapdeal acquired Exclusively in 2015 with an aim to strengthen its fashion business and tap into the luxury and premium category. A large part of Exclusively’s business came from outside India.
Fashion has been an important category for e-commerce marketplaces Snapdeal and Flipkart as it offers high margins compared with mobile phones and books and is one category where Amazon is yet to establish its dominance. Fashion is expected to overtake consumer electronics as the largest category at 35% of the total online spending by 2020, according to a June report by Google-A.T. Kearney. Online retail is expected to surge to $60 billion by then.
Earlier in July, Snapdeal aggressively bid for online fashion retailer Jabong before the deal went to bigger rival Flipkart, which bought it for $70 million all cash, in a move to become the largest online fashion retailer in the country.
Exclusively.com was founded in 2010 by Sunjay Guleria and Mohini Boparai Guleria. Since the inception, the founders sold and bought the company twice over.
In November 2012, online fashion retailer Myntra bought Exclusively.in together with its subsidiary SherSingh.com, an online retailer of private label sports apparel. Exclusively back then was a fashion flash sales site.
In June 2013, the Gulerias together with some angel investors bought back Exclusively from Myntra.
In February 2015, Snapdeal acquired Exclusively.com for an undisclosed amount, in what was believed to be an all-stock deal. The financial details of the deal were not made public.
Post the deal, the name of the company was changed from Exclusively.in to Exclusively.com.
Exclusively was being run by Amit Maheshwari, who before joining Exclusively as its chief executive used to head Snapdeal’s fashion category.
