Yahoo India Homepage today shows up a new section called “Shopping” and if you click on it, you will be led to Flipkart’s site, albeit with a purple-blue header which says – Flipkart.com in association with Yahoo India.
The site has a separate sub-domain on Flipkart – http://yahoo.store.flipkart.com
We are not really sure whether it was Flipkart who approached Yahoo or the other way around. But from what we can say it seems that, Flipkart wanted to tap on millions of Indian users who visit Yahoo site on regular basis.
Yahoo India Homepage is one of the most popular pages visited by Indians – Over 115 million visitors come to Yahoo India homepage every month (as per Similarweb) and most of them are direct visitors. From Flipkart’s perspective this becomes a great doorway for them to attract new visitors on their site.
On the other hand, in our view, Yahoo too stands to benefit quite a lot from this association. While we are not aware of the terms between Flipkart and Yahoo, every visitor that Yahoo sends to this co-branded marketplace, they will make revenue either through commission on sales or via number of impressions.
Interestingly, shoppers can use their existing Flipkart credentials to login to their site.
Whatever the deal between the two, both stand to benefit from this association. Flipkart adds new users and increases sales, while Yahoo makes additional revenue!
Gurmit Singh, managing director, Yahoo India, said “With easy access to Flipkart directly from the Yahoo homepage, we believe that the millions of users who visit the Yahoo network daily will now enjoy not only premium content, but also an exciting shopping experience.”
Mausam Bhatt, senior director, online marketing at Flipkart said, “We are always looking for innovative ways of engaging with the customer. Flipkart and Yahoo are both market leaders in their own space – and in a market where people are increasingly consuming content on digital platforms, a partnership like this helps bridge content and commerce to enhance the product discovery and purchase cycle for online shoppers,”
If you remember, Yebhi has exactly a similar sort of setup with IRCTC, however, that did not seemed to have worked too well, as IRCTC broke-off less than a year into the partnership. IRCTC is right now looking for a new partner and has floated a new tender for the same purpose.