Godavari IT Association, a welfare association of Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh with 25 dealers as part of their association expresses the concern on the drop of walk-in customers drastically in this festive season. They said that they faced severe business drop in this festival season from Vijayadashami to Diwali due to variation in pricing of products when compared to online. Products like Laptops. External hard disks, Pen Drives are sold at cut throat prices and the price difference is around 15 to 20%.
Huge inventories are piled up even by the small traders, as this year we could not convince or justify even our regular customers to buy in our store because the prices we quoted were too high when compared to online and LFR’s. They expressed that as a retailer we work lot to build the confidence on the brand we sell, and truly speaking the brands sell because we put them into the market. With a heated note, the association members expressed that Brands should realize before playing with us, lot of things are involved with us, we provide year long services to the customer, we take all the pains of brands to build their markets.
I don’t understand sometimes, when we help companies to build their brands on our counters then why the companies are promoting online sellers through Flipkart. Snapdeal, Amazon, Paytm and LFR‘s and that too at low prices especially during festive seasons literally killing us, said, Srikanth Namana, President, Godavari IT Association, Rajahmundry.
He also added, Online sellers are hitting us badly on our sales and purchase business plans and we are ending up with huge inventories and eroding our bottom lines which are earned through selling other products. We henceforth decided in our association meeting to bar billing of the products from distributors until we get justification from the brands. This will not only protect our dealers to sustain in the IT business but also helps companies to realise the importance of street retailer over the period of time. This may definitely cause temporary hardship to our dealer fraternity but in long term it will help to run the show. Even other IT associations in Andhra Pradesh are gearing up to fight on the common cause.