Two and half year old Amazon India is now consistently attracting more traffic than the competitors Flipkart and Snapdeal. According to latest data from internet analytics firm Comscore, Amazon India attracted 200 million visitors on its site in October 2015.
In comparison, Flipkart was visited by 164 million people on their web as well as mobile sites combined. Snapdeal logged in 109 million visitors during the same period.
Amazon India has seen the steepest growth in traffic among all the major ecommerce sites in India. Last year we did a report in June – at that time, Flipkart has maximum traffic with over 62 million visitors and Myntra was the close second with just below 60 million. Amazon India came in lowly fifth with 27.6 million, after Jabong and Snapdeal.
However, over last 12 months, Amazon India has registered 7 times growth in their traffic, while Flipkart and Snapdeal have managed to grow only thrice as much.
It’s not just traffic on which Amazon is scoring well – Amazon India sales too have quadrupled compared to last year and the platform has seen over 250 percent rise in the number of sellers they have on the marketplace.
This growth has encouraged Amazon to triple their fulfillment capacity in India during 2014-15. As of now, Amazon has total of 21 fulfillment centers in India, which are operational across 10 states with total capacity of 5 million cubic feet.
Amazon is also flush with money – Last year Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had said that they will be investing $2 billion (around INR 13,000 crore) in Indian market.
Flipkart still rules when it comes to number of orders placed and GMV, however, the gap with Amazon has reduced considerably and one would not be surprised if Amazon beats them on those parameters in next couple of years.
Amazon does not share details of their sales, but they offer more than 25 million products through their marketplace. Last year in September (after 15 months of operation) they reportedly crossed USD 1 Billion in sales. Flipkart is targeting $12 billion GMV this year.
Flipkart’s App Only Strategy Backfired?
One of the reasons, why Flipkart has had lesser traffic is because of their much controversial app-only strategy. Rather than trying to give users the experience they want, they tried to force users to go app-only. In that process they alienated hundreds of thousands of users from their platform. However, after seeing users revolting and not taking too kindly to this move, they finally bought back mobile browser website.