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.
Gurgaon based on demand grocery delivery platform pepper tap has raised $36 million(about Rs 239 crore) in series B funding from Snapdeal, Sequoia, SAIF and few other investors.
With the launch of Freecharge wallet on Tuesday, Snapdeal is taking on market leader Paytm head on that recently claimed to have more than 100 million wallet users in the country.And whichever side we may look but in the end consumers will be the winners.
Snapdeal Cofounder Kunal Bahl and Micromax founder Rahul Sharma have just shared a series of cryptic tweets on twitter.
Snapdeal has had an eventful year. It has been growing at a frentic pace, having raised its headcount by 5 times and building a swanky new office in Gurgaon. Its valuation has increased from $2 billion to a cool $4.7 billion. But worryingly, the company has also seen a corresponding increase in its losses – Snapdeal incurred a loss of Rs. 1350 crore over the past year, a five fold increase over its loss of Rs. 264 crore last year.
The Indian office worker has never had it so good.
A month after Flipkart had people swooning over its new Bangalore office, Snapdeal has come up with a swanky new workplace of its own. Located in a sprawling 450,000 sq. ft campus in Gurgaon, it can house close to 4,500 employees.
With Snapdeal, the country’s second largest online marketplace, signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) last week, the trend of online companies promoting entrepreneurship is consolidating.
It’s boom-time for startups across the world. The unicorn, or a startup with a valuation greater than $1 billion (so named because it used to be as rare as the mythical creature), has now become commonplace. As of 2015, 107 companies across the world feature in this elite list.
The top startups in India in 2015 are, keeping with the times, mostly internet based companies. Mu Sigma, a Bangalore-based analytics firm, makes an interesting entry into the list.