Future Group and Amazon have announced their partnership in India. Although the primary step of this partnership is to sell future groups fashion products online through Amazon, the deal is said to later include all categories of future group’s products.

Speaking on the deal, Kishore Biyani, CEO Future group said that partnership with Amazon will enable Future Group to leverage their strengths, investments and innovations in technology to reach out to wider set of consumers across India.

Amazon’s product delivery services will make it possible for future group to reach across geographies in the country. Being a huge conglomerate of more than 40 brands, Future Group will benefit largely from the ecommerce space upon being partnered with Amazon.

“The bottom line in each of our retail success stories is “know your customer”. Insights into the soul of Indian consumers – how they operate, think, dream and live – helps us innovate and create functionally differentiating products and experiences. Partnership with Amazon, which obsesses to be earth’s most customer centric company, will enable us to leverage their strengths, investments and innovations in technology to reach out to wider set of consumers across India,” Kishore Biyani, Group CEO, Future Group said.

Kishore Biyani had voiced his opinion on Flipkart’s Big Billion Day saying that Flipkart cannot take the nation for granted even for a single day. Biyani’s Future Group has been among the top players in organized brick-and-mortar sales in the country for about 15 years.

Amazon has also pumped in a lot of money, with the recent investment in India being around $2 Billion. Amazon and Flipkart’s head-on war on each other is taking new shapes every day with each investing more than the other in the country over every funding rounds.

Now that the partnership has been announced, Biyani’s take over discounts and predatory pricing needs to be waited and watched upon. Considering the huge fuss happening over the discounts and pricing provided by eCommerce players, the online-offline integration seems to be happening sooner than expected with large brands tying up with eCommerce players.

Future group has been working on several ecommerce initiatives – the latest being Big Bazaar Direct E-commerce store, using which Big Bazaar is targeting 50,000 franchisees by the end of the year through this Franchisee based business model. This will allow consumers to buy Big Bazaar products at their nearest retail store or kiraana outlet.

Hindustan Unilever has also pilot tested online sales of FMCG goods leveraging the firm’s presence in over 3 million physical shops across the country.

TATA Value Homes, Mahindra Automotive had also tied up with Snapdeal to promote sales of housing projects and vehicles through the online marketplace. Users could book for TATA homes or the new Mahindra Scorpio on the website. This is a huge move for both the companies to make such high value products available on the online space. TATA had mentioned that the online sales of TATA Value Homes has increased their reach to a wider audience and had helped speed up their sales drastically. The TATA deal with Snapdeal had happened following Ratan Tata’s personal investment in SnapDeal.

eCommerce is currently the biggest boom in the country and every brand/retailer is trying their hand at providing something new and innovative through their online buying experience. In this struggle to stay in the lead, we will see more Big Billion Days, Discount Offers and online-offline wars quite frequently.