This app lets you buy apparel from malls and get it home-delivered

If you look at your wardrobe today, most of you would find that your wardrobe courtesy lies on some ecommerce fashion brand. However there might be some clothes that didn’t fit you. Some you didn’t like because of the fit and some failed to be of your desired quality. That’s the basic problem. While pricing are low sometimes, you can’t blindly trust on the quality. Often you find returning it a lot of hassle and dream of the day when you would be able to order things from the stores in the mall online.

Wait! If that has been your dream all through, it just came true! India’s first shopping app, Pretr is letting you shop at your favourite store and mall across the city with just at a click.

Pretr provides a seamless and convenient shopping experience across channels for consumers to discover what’s in stores, check product availability, shop online and get same day delivery. As if the options weren’t enough already, Pretr also allows you to reserve online to try and pick up from store.

The app integrates with the brands’ existing technology infrastructures so that the experience after checkout—receipt, shipping, customer service—is similar to having bought something from the brand’s store itself. It’s just a different entry point and one that does not require your physical presence.

The app which debuted last September at IRF 2015 puts over 500 stores in one place, allowing you to buy from Brands like AND, GlobalDesi, Louis Philip, 109°F Globus, @Home, Croma, Metro Shoes, and many more.

So we caught up a chat with Pretr CEO Bhavik Jhaveri to discuss the things further.

Excerpts from the discussion

Concept
As a consumer, I always had my apprehensions to shop online. How can we order and wait for 3 days to get products delivered? I couldn’t trust the authenticity of the seller, whether the product that I am ordering will fit me, if not why can’t I exchange at nearest store. So in short it’s my own shopping inconvenience as consumer lead to “Pretr”.

As Pretr we want to make From-Store shopping highly convinient. With Pretr one can not only buy online from any mall / store across city but also reserve those products and pickup anytime. Connecting consumers to city wide malls and stores for seamless online and instore shopping is what Pretr does.

Discover what’s live at stores - offers, products, sizes. Buy them and get it delivered from the store in matter of hours. Alternatively reserve them, get a free cab ride to the store, and try the reserved products at stores and checkout. While doing so at all point you are always shopping from stores, you get store invoives, you earn & burn brand loyalty and can return/exchange at stores too.

Free cab ride to pickup?
That may sound absurd. But so did COD, Easy Returns too sound when these were introduced.

Now let me put some facts here. 30% of COD orders get rejected. 65% of the people buy 2+ sizes, keep the one that fits and returns other 2. There are frequent cases of people not only buying multiple sizes but also from multiple marketplaces. The one that reaches early they keep and return the rest. Now just put some basic maths to logistics in all these scenarios. Rs50/- per delivery will account for 3*50 forward and 2*50 returns even in moderate cases which is close to Rs.250 per item.

Click and collect with free cab ride, retailers happily sponsor the rides. As not only are they able to control the last mile experience but also an opportunity to cross-sell. Retailers pool this rides in multiple products from multiple stores cases. More than any thing else even if it is rejected the product doesn’t move out and hence its direct to shelf for next. Undoudtedly this is more economical than deliveries at scale.

How is it different from traditional ecommerce
The present online only shopping apps are highly segmented and transactional in nature. Typical online app primrily creates Price > Product > Expereince consumer culture. Pretr is completely experiential and is a highly integrated shopping utility. For us Convinience > Expereince > Product > Price. Pretr primarily targets 85% of internet population who dont trust online, but at the same time seeks ecommerce alike or even better shopping expereinces while shopping at malls and stores around city.

Some of our key features include online delivery, in-store delivery. Now you are wondering what’s that? What if you walk in to the store and buy something, but the alteration takes 30 more minutes? You can ask to get your product home delivered right from the stores. Many consumers buy products at malls, and use Pretr just for gift-wrapping and delivery to another part of the city and happily pay for it!

Offers and end of season sale (EOSS)
We have survived 2 EOSS since our birth. EOSS at stores is the most dynamic pricing, offers and inventory movement. Our unique Order Allocation Algorithms mixed with our deep integrations with central systems makes us completely realtime interms of live offers, availabilty of products and 98% fulfillment success from stores. Also, just to reiterate we give store original invoice to our customers so we have no choice but price our offers right. Worst case if we differ from store offer we refund our client’s immediately to match store invoiced deal.

Present stores
We are partnered with close to 100 brands, 5+ Large Format Stores, 2 malls which account to more than 500 stores across Mumbai. We are spread across 5 primary lifestyle categories, Mens, Womens, Kids, Home, Electronics. Some of our key partnership includes brands like AND, Globus, Global Desi, Louis Phillip, Allen Solley, Croma, Metro Shoes, Inorbit to name few.

Funding
Unlike early stage start-ups, Pretr is at little different stage of maturity. We are a 45 member working team from day 1. Since we have a parent company Ambab we conciously did not wanted to raise funds too early in business. Diluting too early for seed round dosent make sense to us. We have invested close to 0.5m$ in our personal capacity, few friends & family. We are keeping investor community abraised about our progress. We are in process of our pre series A round.

Expansion
Plan is to expand in 7 more citites before fiscal year end. Most interestingly this year we are launching Pretr Open Suit, an enterprise grade white labeled omnichannel suite for Retailers.