E-commerce platform Shopclues plans to ramp up its offline presence by opening 100 franchisee stores in 2019-20.

The Gurgaon-based company, which opened its first store in Lucknow in November last year, has set its sight on expanding in the east and Northeast, starting with Bengal.

The company is aiming to garner around 12-15 per cent of its total orders from the offline channel in the ongoing fiscal. It is looking to book 4 million orders through the offline stores in the current year.

“The idea is to have an omnichannel presence, especially in tier –II and tier-III locations where buyers still have preference for brick and mortar stores. We plan to open 100 stores this fiscal and these will be franchisee-owned and franchisee-operated,” said Rikita Taneja, director and business head – fashion, Shopclues.

“We tested with a store in UP last year and the experience has been great. We have also opened three stores in Bengal and plan to open nine more in the state by this month,” Taneja said.

Many of the new stores will be in key locations in the city such as Shyambazar, Lake Town, Rajarhat, Joka or farther off such as Paharpur, Konnagar, Kalyani and Kakdeep.

After Bengal, it will expand in Odisha, UP, Bihar, Assam, Meghalaya and Sikkim.

Taneja said the strategy behind opening offline stores is to address the local needs with local products and in local language.

The stores will also provide touch and feel of the products, easy return and exchanges and will also act as delivery touch points that will enable the online retailer to provide faster deliveries.

“Depending on the size of the stores, there could be about 1,000 to 1,500 top selling SKUs (stock keeping units),” said Taneja.