MUMBAI: One of the conveniences of modern times is that everything we need or want is available on our television screens and/or is just a call for a click of a button away. The market of television shopping has grown over the years. A study in 2015 stated that the cable and satellite market consists of 140 million (14 crore) households or 650 million (65 crore) people as of December, 2014. In comparison, the number of internet users was estimated at 302 million (30.2 crore).

Even when everything is switching to mobile, the 24 hour tele-shopping channels still manage to grab a fair share of the market, albeit just a fraction in terms of sales by the eCommerce players, due to television’s humongous reach. The business was estimated to reach revenues of around Rs 5,000 crore by the closure of fiscal 2014.15.

So far, teleshopping’s bastions were largely limited to late night teleshopping on various channels and a few pure teleshopping channels. But, there was an opportunity to service rural markets that were not being catered to by eCommerce players as yet. The Akshay Kumar – Raj Kundra led teleshopping channel Best Deal TV launched Best Deal TV especially for the Tamil market.

Among the major players in the teleshopping space, Shop CJ (previously known as Star CJ Alive), has also rolled out regional shopping channels in Telugu and Tamil. The Telugu channel was launched about six months ago and the Tamil entity came to be about two months ago.

In 2015, Shop CJ held 20 percent of the market share and aimed to increase market share in the future. According to Shop CJ COO Dhruva Chandrie, sales have doubled in 2016. Shop CJ had a turnover of Rs1,200 crore in 2015 Sales have already hiked by 40 percent with orders having grown 52 per cent in 2016. The Shop CJ management team had announced a target of Rs 250 crore by October 2016 from the Telangana and Andhra Pradhesh regions alone. The brand believes that it is on the way to meet the targets since the response as of now has been positive.

Chandrie revealed that there were high expectations from the venture and around the time of India’s major festival of Diwali, there were plans to bring out a Kannada teleshopping channel as well. He further revealed that setting up a regional channel required completely new production backup facilities to be setup altogether. The production of a regional channel was to done separately in the local language. A new regional channel would cost around Rs 35-40 crores, while setting up a warehouse would cost almost the same.

The Shop CJ teleshopping network has included regional brands like Butterfly and Preeti among others, along with other many national and international brands in its offerings. Its regional channels have products catering to regional demands and products are sourced from all over the country. Chandrie also revealed that his company was in the process of finalising deals with many television channel distributors in the region and that his network’s products are already available on major DTH and local cable operators. Since the carriage deals are still work-in-progress, Chandrie said that he was not in a position to reveal further details.

Teleshopping’s largest selling products remain kitchen appliances, followed by IT products, cameras, saris and kurtas. “The channels are on 24x7 and have a wide viewership” said Chandrie.

In conclusion, Chandirk said that although the channels were at a very initial, a highly nascent stage, his network believed that a higher growth in the regional markets would boost the overall growth of his company and help it gain a higher market share.