Flipkart, a home-grown e-commerce platform, is reportedly working on a loyalty programme that will be called the Flipkart Plus to take on its arch rival Amazon’s Prime subscription service. The company is reportedly been working on this services for more than a year, and it will make an announcement around it on August 15, according to a news report in the Times of India.
While the Amazon Prime is a subscription-based paid service, the Flipkart Plus would not have any prefixed subscription amount. Instead, the company would offer several exclusive benefits to users such as free delivery, early access to sale events and rewards across brands based on the frequency of transactions a customer makes.
This is not the first time the home-grown e-commerce portal is launching a loyalty programme service. In 2014, the company rolled out a service called the Flipkart First in which the company promised to offer similar sort of benefits at a subscription amount of Rs 500 per year. However, the service did not get much traction and was eventually taken down.
The Flipkart Plus benefits would be available in the form of reward coins that consumers can earn on every transaction they make on Flipkart. However, the coins benefit would not be extended to Flipkart’s sub-brands and services such as Myntra, Jabong and PhonePe for the time being.