Epson not to tie up with e-commerce portals

No doubt e-commerce could be one of the best delivery model to reach out to customers but Epson is not eager to join hands with them.

Speaking to The DQ Week, in an exclusive interview, N. Sambamoorthy, Director, Sale and Marketing, Epson India said, "Especially with a large demography like India e-commerce could be the ebst possible way to reach out to customers. But our thoughts are slightly different." He said that as so long as e-commerce is able to place the product with the value that it is defined for then Epson could be comfortable.

"But today most of the online portals if you notice have not been following the basic fundamentals of business which is hurting the channel community. Epson does not have any association or engagement with e-commerce sites. The portals notice the top ten products in the market across the categories and with huge marketing funds, which I believe they have got quite a lot, they are into business", adds Sambamoorthy.

On asking if there is any possibility on Epson tying up with e-commerce in future, Sambamoorthy replied, "Looking at the future: this is a good delivery model but end of the day what we feel is we could also reach out to our customers through our channel network which is 220 partners across the country and more than 6500 resellers. With them we can have a better e-commerce model".

At this moment in time Epson feels that e-commerce firstly needs to adhere to business ethics and practices before we can think of aligning ourselves with them to sell our products.

Sambamoorthy also added saying, "E-commerce is good for some of the consumer products. But when it comes to IT, given the penetration of internet in the country is still very low. So for a product like ours selling through e-commerce is a bit too early in my opinion. So we might look at it at an appropriate time but not at this stage".