You can now buy things on Flipkart offline. Here’s how

Call it the conversion room of the new age e-tail, Flipkart is introducing offline stores where the not-so-tech-savvy customers can browse and buy with assistance from a Flipkart staff. This assisted e-commerce model would help the customers to touch and feel the phone in designated stores, as per a news report in The Economic Times.

This would be a boon for the customers in tier 3 and tier 4 towns, where the delivery can be received at the same stores or at home.

According to news reports, the Flipkart experience centres are available inside 30 outlets, across 19 cities, of the mobile retail chain Spice Hotspot. The ecommerce giant is in talks with eight to ten other offline mobile retail chains for the same.

Meanwhile people can experience this module of shopping on through smartphone. "This is targeted mainly at places where online shopping is still catching up. Customers in tier-3 and tier-4 towns have heard about online shopping but are still circumspect," Ankit Nagori, chief business officer at Flipkart, told TOI . Nagori said that once these customers got a taste of online, they would buy online the next time. "This is going to be a big customer conversion tool for us in the smartphone category," he said.

For the brands like Motorola and Alcatel that retail only through Flipkart, this would mean more business for them as well. People often wish to experience the products before buying and these experience stores would be a boon for them.