According to data published, Flipkart is leading the Indian market ahead of its competitors Amazon and Snapdeal.
According to recent news it is believed that Amazon Inc. has planned a heavy investment in its India operations for the next few years. The company is already growing at a fast pace in the United States but it wants to bolster its international market presence, especially in India. The online retailer announced an investment of nearly $2 billion (INR 13,500 crores) to expand its reach in the region. Amazon is looking to take on the homegrown rivals, Flipkart and Snapdeal, and wants to capture major market share than the two start ups in the region.
Despite of the fact that Amazon planned such heavy investments, Flipkart and Snapdeal have been busy in raising massive venture capital as well since the US retailer made announcement regarding expanding in India back in July 2014. Amazon has yet to penetrate its offerings in the Indian market. In the meantime, sources suggest that Flipkart is easily leading the market on the basis of mobile traffic. The data published by Similar Web for last year, it was reported that Flipkart is ahead of Amazon and Snapdeal in having the most mobile traffic among the e-commerce websites.
The Indian based start up boasted of having nearly 47 percent of the mobile commerce traffic last year whereas its popular Myntra app was second with having 16 percent of the market share. If the share of Flipkart and Myntra are combined to get an idea of their domination then their mobile traffic share touches 63 percent in India which is way more than half of the share in the market.
The Indian online retailer also claimed that it is also leading the race of total app installs in the past year. According to the firm, Flipkart app has been installed by more than 37 percent of the total Android smart phone base in the region. If we combine Myntra app installs as well then the market share would rise to 47 percent in total which again is nearly half of the share in total.
Amazon’s recent success whether in domestic or international markets is credited to its loyalty program Amazon Prime. The firm is benefitting a lot from its loyalty program which was initially started by Costco Wholesale almost a decade ago.
Apart from this, Amazon and Snapdeal also have their own mobile websites for the region which are more user friendly than Flipkart’s mobile website. It is believed that Flipkart mobile website can only be accessed using a Google Chrome browser on an Android smart phone whereas its Myntra is an online app portal only.
Ignoring all of the above facts, the online retailing giant announced in December that it has topped the charts for being the most visited e-commerce website for the September-October quarter, based on the data published by comScore. The figure was way ahead of Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Jabong until October 2015.
Regardless of losing the market status in a few months’ time, Amazon is expected to grow faster with its heavy investments. The company recently invested another INR 1,696 crore in India units.
