Among its benefits is the absence of additional commissions or fees; earnings of IT partners will be directly transferred to their bank accounts
In an attempt to transform offline IT retailers and dealers to e-tailers, and make them digitally independent, Delhi-NCR based PCAIT has announced the launch of its B2B and B2C portals for a large section of IT partners. Initially, the portal will be available to Delhi partners and gradually it will form alliances with other IT associations and rope in partners from other regions. PCAIT estimates to bring 25,000 partners, covering IT, mobile and CCTV to this online portal in the next 18 months.
Talking about this initiative, Alok Gupta, President, PCAIT informed CRN India, “We at PCAIT are soon launching B2B and B2C online portals for IT partners in Delhi, where partners will have their own product catalogue and page for customers as well as for dealers and distributors. This portal will be available to IT partners free of cost and we will start the registration of the portal in next 10 days.”
The association further clarified that the online platform will be different from the private e-commerce entities and will focus on IT partners and customers. Among its benefits is that no additional commissions or fees will be levied and whatever the traders earn will be directly transferred to their bank accounts.
Gupta highlighted that the portal is developed on a “phygital model”, which means the conveniences of digital without losing the human touch.
With the reducing footfalls at physical stores and growing convenience of online shopping, customers prefer the physical store owners to have a digital presence of the offline store.
“We are encouraging partners to enable their businesses digitally present, offline stores will be there but due to the virus and social distancing norms, partners can tap both offline and online sales. Online presence will help retailers to do more digital marketing and showcase the products online for their regular customers and serve them digitally,” Gupta said.
The proposed B2B portal will connect IT partners located in bigger and smaller markets. “The idea of B2B portal is to collaborate with the partners for executing the services and implementation of projects at the local level. The portal will increase the joint opportunities for those partners who do not have direct presence and can take help of local partners for completing the project,” Gupta explained.
In the past two months, other leading national trade bodies like CAIT and FAIITA also announced the launch of national portals for offline portals. The new initiative of PCAIT will further boost the IT partners in digital direction.
