Amazon’s Indian customers received an unusual mail in their inboxes today. Instead of mails about Amazons’s latest products and discounts, this mail came directly from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
In his letter addressed personally to every customer, Bezos thanks them for making Amazon the highest visited e-commerce site in India within two and a half years of its launch. The letter supports the claim with a report from ComScore that compares Amazon’s stats with Indian local rivals like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Jabong.
As late as October 2014, Amazon trailed Flipkart, Snapdeal and Jabong in terms of unique visitors. Cut to a year later, and it is ahead of all its peers, having recorded 30 million visitors this month compared to Flipkart’s 27.5 million. Amazon’s sales in 2015 have quadrupled since the last year and the company expects India to overtake Japan, Germany and the UK to become its largest overseas market besides becoming the quickest to reach $10 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) in the company’s history.
The letter comes at a time when the e-commerce war in India between the biggies Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon is heating up. In the recently concluded Holiday Sales, all three had offered jaw-dropping discounts advertised heavily to woo the Indian consumer.
Amazon’s experience of over 20 years in e-retail seems to be helping it pull ahead of its competitors Snapdeal and Flipkart, both of which had head starts in India. Flipkart was founded in 2007 and Snapdeal in 2010, but Amazon, having set up shop in the country in late 2013, has rapidly risen above its peers.