Koovs Exits Deals Space, Shifts Focus To Lifestyle Products

After changing track from daily deals to general e-commerce, two-year-old Bangalore-based startup Koovs has stopped offering deals altogether. The company had earlier shifted its focus to products but was still offering daily deals in a separate segment.

Koovs' earlier product offerings came under 16 broad categories, such as computers, mobiles, shoes, home décor, toys, bags & backpacks, home appliances, electronics, fashion, cameras, health, kitchen, gaming zone, watches, personal care and pens & diaries. It has now removed a lot of these categories and consolidated the others.

As of now, the only categories featured on the site (these are further split into sub-categories) include apparels, accessories, jewellery, footwear, watches, bags, personal care and home décor. It is, therefore, apparent that Koovs is now primarily focusing on lifestyle products.

The home page has a number of sections including new arrivals, apparels, accessories, shoes, watches, bags and wallets, jewellery and gifts. In addition to a discount on the MRP, most of the products also come with a separate cashback offer of up to 25 per cent. Delivery is free and the site accepts both online payment as well as cash on delivery (COD).

The company has also come up with a special offer for its members. Under this offer, a member will receive Rs 200 in his Koovs account if he invites more than 20 friends. The site is also offering an iPad 2 as a grand prize for the member who invites the most number of friends.

Koovs Marketing Pvt Ltd was co-founded by Rajesh Kamra, Manish Tewari and Amit Shukla, and it initially offered discounts and vouchers on a wide range of categories. Early last year, Delhi-based B2B rewards and loyalty programme firm BenefitsPLUS Media Pvt Ltd had acquired a majority stake in Koovs for over $2 million.

At that time, Paul Shoker, founder and CEO of BenefitsPLUS, had mentioned, "We are going to turn Koovs into a very interesting e-commerce business. It won't be an average daily deal site or a group buying site, but will evolve into a specialised e-commerce player."

So we guess that the transition is finally complete.

We tried to contact Kamra but he was unavailable for comment. So we called up the customer care number instead and a company executive confirmed that the site is no longer offering deals and won't offer them in future. We then probed further about categories like computers and mobile phones as these are now conspicuously absent and the executive clarified that the site is now focusing only on lifestyle products.

Earlier this year, Kamra had told Techcircle that the site had more than 20,000 products available across the product categories. And although the company was planning to increase this number to at least 2.5 lakh by July 2012, we wonder whether it has been able to do so, considering the fact that quite a few categories have been removed from the site. Kamra had also claimed that the number of daily unique visitors to the site was around 2 lakh and in the product categories alone, Koovs was doing around 70,000 transactions per month (the ticket size ranging between Rs 50 and Rs 2 lakh.

"We were seeing a lot of traction on the services that we were offering. The same customers came back to us and asked us for various products. Since the demand was high, we went out and got those products for them. This is how we started offering products and gradually built various product categories," Kamra had mentioned at that time.

But why should it focus on lifestyle products alone? Probably because the company wants to focus on getting one thing right instead of offering everything and making a mess in the process. Also, the fact that it has been selling products as a general e-com site for close to half-a-year now means that it has a fair idea of what products are in demand on the site.