The festive season is in full swing, and Indian e-commerce giants are battling it out for a share of India’s online shopping pie. The 3 biggest players – Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal – are running simultaneous sales from 13th to 17th October, and marketing and promotions have been fierce.
India’s great ecommerce wars are well and truly on, and the three main players – Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal – are battling it out for a share of the Indian comsumer’s attention this festival season. Flipkart’s much vaunted Big Billion Day sale around the corner, and all eyes are on the event after the fiasco last year when the sale had left thousands of customers angry and the company had to issue an apology for the site crashing during the event.
While Flipkart has been embroiled in many scandals of late, including the big billion days fiasco, the debate on its now-retracted app-only push, or the various discount discrepanices as reported by customers, the ecommerce giants finds itself in another soup.
After foreign companies, including Google, Amazon, Uber have already made a beeline for the state, they Indian counterparts are following suit. Flipkart, India’s premier etailer, had decided to set up its largest warehouse in Telangana. This will be the company’s 16th warehouse in the country.
If you’d planned to plant yourself in front of a computer and avail of the awesome discounts on offer during Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale, prepare to be disappointed. Flipkart’s biggest annual sale will only be available to the users of its app.
Flipkart is dealing with a bit of a PR crisis of late. Back when it launched in 2007, the internet was inundated with reviews that gushed about its customer service, its superfast deliveries, and how it brought the world of retail to our doorsteps. People were unanimous in their appreciation for the company, and Flipkart grew by leaps and bounds, becoming the $16 billion behemoth it is today.
But Flipkart Chief Product Officer Punit Soni seems to believe that there’s more to these threads than meets the eye.
Punit’s move back to India enables him to have a fascinating perspective into India’s startup journey. Having left India when there was no startup scene here to speak of, and having seen Silicon Valley’s tech scene first hand, when he speaks about India, you listen.
And he’s just predicted a correction in the Indian startup market.
While latest reports suggest that Flipkart has backed down from its plan of shutting down its website, it’s still coming up with other ways to make people switch to the app. The newest method to force users to go mobile seems to be app-only products.
Amit Bhawani wanted to solve a $100 billion problem that had been vexing business insiders, industry watchers and casual consumers alike. He wanted to get a handle on the e-commerce space in India and understand which of the two stalwarts, Amazon and Flipkart, was doing better. He chose a rather unconventional way to go about this. Instead of poring over balance sheets and decoding graphs with GMV figures, he went straight to the consumer – he set up www.FlipkartVsAmazon.com.