The e-commerce market is becoming more and more mature in India with each passing day. All the major e-commerce players like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal have a long road to cover for becoming completely mature e-commerce players. And in this battle to become the customer’s favourite online shopping portal, these brands are always offering attractive offers and discounts to retain loyal customers and gain new customers at the same time.
According to the data from Internet analytics firm comScore, Amazon India now gets more traffic than Flipkart and Snapdeal. Amazon.in received 23.6 million visitors as compared to 23.5 million visitors of Flipkart and 17.9 million visitors of Snapdeal in May 2015.
Last year, in May, Flipkart was leading the traffic trend with 13 million unique visitors/month while Amazon.in and Snapdeal were both close to 10 million unique visitors/month. This translates to a whopping 142% increase for Amazon.in, 90% more visitors for Snapdeal, and 80% surge in traffic for Flipkart.
What Type Of Web Traffic Matters The Most For E-Commerce Portals?
Industry experts believe that the most important factor for measuring the popularity of any e-commerce portal is its number of repeat visitors. The number of repeat visitors can be used to estimate the ‘loyal and stickiness’ of customers to a specific website.
‘Unique visitors’ means new visitors visiting a website, and is a sure sign of the growing popularity of any website. But it can’t be used to determine if those visitors are likely to visit the website again or not.
“While unique visitors is a metric to show the growing interest in e-commerce, a better metric to speak about a company’s performance would be the number of repeat customers an online retailer gets,” said Arvind Singhal, Chairman of retail consultancy Technopak.
He also said that the online retail offers available options and price comparison by ‘just a click’.
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) Is Also Important
GMV is another popular parameter used by e-commerce portals for reflecting the total sales value depicting the total volume of their business.
Amazon.in doesn’t share the details of the sales of its 25 million listed products, but it reportedly crossed the $1 billion mark in GMV in September 2014. Flipkart expected its GMV to touch $8 billion by December last year and is now hoping to go beyond the Rs. 76,000 crore mark in its GMV. As per the reports, Snapdeal is also targeting to reach $8 billion in GMV by the end of the current year.
GMV is an important metric as far as size and scale of the company is concerned in e-commerce, but it is not the sole metric to gauge the health of business. In a marketplace model, the revenues for an e-retailer, which are a small margin of the sales, should also be taken into account,” Arvind Singhal added.
We had earlier reported in 2014, how these e-portals were still making incurring heavy losses instead of huge investments. While Flipkart was the leader in net revenue, it was also on the top of the chart when it came to losses.
The trend of online shopping has now started to pick up pace in India. It is still at a nascent state at the moment, so it would be too early to comment anything on customer loyalty. But it has definitely started to give tough competition to the offline stores.
[…] in less than 3 years since launch, has already surpassed Flipkart in terms of traffic and are probably pretty close to their GMV as […]
Flipkart’s Arrogance has no end. They scrapped their mobile site and forced people to download the app. I like how amazon overtook them !
yes, it is too early to say so. so many competitors rush into india market, there will be a never-have situation. as far as i know, alibab, dhgate.com and other e commerce sites from US and japan all start to run their business in india.