What do you do when you run short of atta, dal, chawal, milk, eggs or bread? You pick up the phone and call your neighbourhood kirana shop, and the stuff gets delivered to your door free-of-cost, right? And if the milk is spoiled or the dal different from the variety you ordered, you can have it picked back, no questions asked, right?

Tune in to HomeShop18 TV, the country's first 24-hour home shopping channel from Network18 Group, where you can compare brands, check prices, order and pay only on delivery or through credit card, with guaranteed 15-day return policy. And the deals are at least 20% to 50% cheaper than those available at the physical stores.

The channel launched in April last year and beamed to cable and satellite TV channels in 5.5 million homes deals in 300 brands (20,000 stock keeping units) in 20 categories that can be delivered to customers in 2,300-odd cities.

But this is because the home shopping category is still new and nascent in India. "The dynamics of the market were so unclear that we had no clue about the demographics or where our sales would come from," reveals Malhotra. So the first blunder was discovered when the channel went all out into the non-TAM (a measure of television viewership in India that covers 23 cities) tier II and tier III cities simply because the carriage fee there was lower than in the metros.

"Later we discovered that a bulk of our sales were originating from the metros and not from the hinterland, as we had hopped would be the case," says Malhotra. The data indicated that nearly 30% of HomeShop18's sales were coming from the top 20 cities. "This indicated that shoppers in the metros were perhaps mall-weary or recession-hit and were now looking for an alternative shopping mode that would fetch them more value for their money," he adds. Armed with this in-sight and fresh funds from the investor, HomeShop18 is ramping up fast in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

That the home shopping business is unique cannot be denied. Even within the broadcasting space, HomeShop18 is different from other news channels in the sense that it combines several business streams a buying house that identifies products that can be sold on TV; a broadcasting arm that generates six hours of live programming; a fully-supported logistics division to ensure undisrupted, timely deliveries to 2,300-odd cities; an IT support system to create a seamless multimedia environment to club television, web (HomeShop18 has a vanilla shopping site that is primarily a catalogue service) and print (brochures and other marketing material); and last but not the least, a 24-hour customer contact centre that has to be manned not by usual teleservice agents but by trained salesmen with deep product knowledge, who can be spokespersons for the brands.