Future Group's plans to boost on-line sales has come across a cyber hurdle with its flagship e-commerce portal FutureBazaar being hacked and rendered dysfunctional for the last two days.
Terming the hacking of www.futurebazaar.com as 'denial of service attack', FutureBazaar chief executive officer Rajiv Prakash told PTI, "The website has been down for the last couple of days and has been blocked to consumers."
He said the company is currently working to tackle the problem internally and also taking a legal action against the hackers.
"We have filed a complaint with the Cyber Crime Branch in Mumbai. Internally we are working to get the site up and running and it should be fine soon," Prakash said.
However, to minimise the business loss, the company has kept its phone commerce active and consumers can make purchases through the same.
Though, Prakash did not comment on the kind of losses the company may be suffering everyday because of the problem, the portal is one of the emerging business verticals of the group.
The Future Group has set a target of at least 10 per cent of the group's total retail revenues of around Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion) to come from digital platforms in the next three years.
As a part of the plan, the group is strengthening its online businesses led by FutureBazaar and online portals for its other retail formats.
Through the portal the company had started the 'battle for best price' offer ahead of the festive season this year, selling one particular item for four days at gap of every fortnight.
Its laptop offer had met with a good response from consumers around Diwali, selling about 4,000 units generating revenues of close to Rs 10 crore (Rs 100 million).
Image: Future Bazaar founder Kishore Biyani.
