Flipkart is widening its selection of brands & goods and ensuring faster deliveries to customers.
After losing high-spending urban online shoppers to its main rival Amazon in the recent past, Flipkart is introducing a series of new initiatives to woo back customers is the Indian metro cities, to reclaim lost ground.
Flipkart is widening its selection of brands & goods and ensuring faster deliveries to customers, in order to attract customer base in tier 2 cities. It plans to achieve this using the war chest of USD 4 billion it had raised from chief investors such as Japan’s SoftBank and China’s Tencent last year, reported Economic Times.
In an interview with ET, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart, said, “Two-thirds of the incremental GMV (gross merchandise value) in the next 6-7 years is going to be driven by the tier-2 markets. But that doesn’t mean the other one-third doesn’t matter. It matters.”
He added the company has added 30-40 points of growth in the metro cities, in the past 8 months. “We were not the strongest there, we were going very slowly. But in the past 8 months, we really have ramped up.”
According to its estimates, Flipkart’s business grew at 85 percent year-on-year in terms of gross merchandise volume during April-September 2017, including the festive sales. This is almost 13 percent more than Amazon’s registered growth in the September 2017 quarter in terms of gross merchandise volume.
Being an Indian player, many experts studying the e-commerce markets suggest Flipkart may have a slight edge over Amazon. Till 2015, Flipkart had a lead over Amazon in business.
Redseer data quoted in the report says 2017 added 10 million shoppers in India and 19 million are expected to be added in 2018.
