HomeShop18

» see homeshop18.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The customer this thing was built for did not have a browser. That is the fact everything else about HomeShop18 hangs off. It launched on 9 April 2008 as India's first round-the-clock television shopping channel, owned by Network18, and it was pitched at a household with a screen in the front room and a phone, in a country where the number of people with a television ran an order of magnitude ahead of the number with a connection. The order went through a call center. The payment came in cash when the box arrived.

It was on all the direct-to-home platforms that mattered, at 151 on Tata Sky and 112 on Airtel, and from 1 November 2015 it went onto DD Free Dish at channel 45, which is the free satellite service that reaches households paying nobody anything. That last placement is what the whole model rested on. A free-to-air slot is the cheapest way to put a shop in front of tens of millions of people who are not going to type an address into anything.

The web side was real and it was second. There was a site from the start and a mobile-optimized version from April 2012, then iOS and Android apps in 2013 with the live channel piped into them, and by September 2012 the company was claiming close to ten million cumulative orders shipped. GS Home Shopping of South Korea, which knew this business better than anyone, put money in twice and ended up around $29.5 million deep. Coinjoos went in as an acquisition in 2011, Shop CJ Network in 2017.

I have no personal relationship to any of this and the honest reason is that the category needs a gap Turkey did not have. Television shopping exists here, mostly as segments bought on private channels, but it never became a national channel with a warehouse behind it, because Turkish households came online in roughly the same decade they got cable and never spent fifteen years being reachable by broadcast and unreachable by browser. HomeShop18 was selling into that gap. When the gap closed, the business had nothing left underneath it.

~ the case file ~

~ who was watching ~

The products that moved were the ones that demonstrate well on camera in eight minutes. Kitchen appliances and gold-plated jewelry sets, sold on a price that kept dropping while a countdown ran in the corner of the screen. Presenters worked in Hindi and the format never pretended to be anything other than what it was, which is why it landed with an audience that had been told for years the internet was for other people.

That audience is also the ceiling. A viewer who orders by phone and pays cash on delivery costs more to serve and cannot be measured the way an account holder can. The channel could reach a hundred million homes and still be building a customer base that generated almost no data and very little repeat business. Flipkart and Amazon were spending the same years acquiring people who would come back on their own.

~ the money going out ~

Revenue for the year to March 2014 came in at 368.2 crore rupees, up better than sixty percent, against a loss of 83.9 crore. The following year revenue reached 449 crore and the loss went to 174.9 crore, which is the shape of a business buying growth. The year after that revenue fell back to 390.4 crore. The losses narrowed only because the spending stopped.

On 28 February 2017 roughly 200 of about 600 employees were let go, some forty percent of the company, in the same month Snapdeal cut 600 and Stayzilla suspended operations. The statement said the point was to be leaner and to focus on the television shopping space, which is the language a company uses when it is retreating to the one part that still works. It kept going for two more years on that basis.

~ what the vendors found ~

The channel closed on 24 May 2019. On 6 June the suppliers learned that Network18 had sold HomeShop18 to a firm called Skyblue Buildwell, which nobody in the trade had heard of and which nobody could get on the phone. A vendors' association formed and put the number at more than 200 suppliers owed somewhere between 150 and 200 crore rupees. Individual claims ran from 50 lakh to 2.8 crore. Payments had started failing around February, and some of the unpaid invoices dated back to December 2018.

The association called the deal fraudulent, arguing that a shell had been dropped in to hold the liabilities while the assets went elsewhere, and pointed at a director connected to a longstanding associate of the Ambani group that owned Network18. None of it was ever settled in a way that produced money. Eleven years of being the shop for people the internet had not reached yet, and the last thing the business did was become unreachable itself.

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