‘e-lala’ portal

With an aim of promoting interests of 5.77 crore small businesses, an online portal 'e-lala' was launched to promote business-to-business and trader-to-customer transactions and reduce costs. Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu inaugurated 'e-lala', an e-commerce portal of Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT).

• e-lala, a city and location based portal, seeks to promote business-to-business and trader-to-customer transactions in a city and thereby eliminating middlemen and resulting in reduced cost of goods and services.
• e-lala's distinctive features include a speciality corner promoting unique products associated with each city, an inquiry corner enabling consumers post their enquiries for a particular product which will be responded to in 24 hours and an artisans corner enabling artisans and entrepreneurs display their products.
• According to CAIT, e-lala enables physical stores to have their own online stores enabling them to retain their customer base besides additional source of growth in business.
• Since it is a city-based portal with involvement of only local traders, choosing an object becomes easy for consumers.

Why it is launched: Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which is lobby of offline traders from across country, decided to launch online portal in order to counter increase in number of   e –retail websites.

Benefits of online stores:

• Building a website is cheaper than opening a store, and you can reach customers online anywhere in the world. Shopping is easy and comfortable for customers, and you can customize their experience based on past sales and preferences.
• This will increase the potential online customer base of retailer.
• When you shop online, you can compare offerings and pricing at different stores with the simple click of a button
• Online shopping stores are open round the clock of 24/7, 7 days a week and 365 days. It is very rare to find any conventional retail stores that are open 24/7. The availability of online stores give you the freedom to shop at your own pace and convenience
• It directly save the time money of both the retailer and customer.

By: Vishal