It has only been two weeks since Snapdeal officially diversified into bus and flight tickets booking and online food ordering business. Now, Snapdeal has further plans to diversify to more than being just an online marketplace for electronics, clothes and groceries.
The New Delhi based company has tied-up with UrbanClap, a personal services provider, to offer such services from Snapdeal app itself. The UrbanClap service will be integrated in Snapdeal’s Android app which will allow customers to get household solutions and electronic appliances repaired and serviced from the comfort of their home.
Snapdeal has already partnered with Cleartrip and Redbus for flight and bus bookings, and Zomato for online food ordering. UrbanClap joins the bandwagon with 80+ services live on the app.
Both the parties enjoy the collaboration – Snapdeal charges a commission on every booking done through its app, while Cleartrip, Redbus, Zomato and now UrbanClap get exposure to Snapdeal’s millions of visitors and probably get more bookings on their apps.
Zomato had nearly 19 Million users using the app everyday for restaurant listings out of which a few do order food. UrbanClap is also being used for services like plumbing, house cleaning, AC repairs and television installation etc. which invites a lot of customers to its app.
Snapdeal doesn’t only expand into such domains, it technically opens its services to more industries that it cannot single-handedly get into. Partnerships have been proven to be better than market entry in this age of thousands of startups and it makes sense to tie-up with the leaders in the respective businesses.
Also, from Snapdeal’s perspective, they can enable such services without much effort or investment – it is just matter of integrating the partners’ APIs into their own app and they are ready to go!
The company hopes to attract a lot of potential users who have Snapdeal’s app but not other apps like Redbus, Cleartrip and UrbanClap. They will have the ease of using additional services in one app itself, thereby saving time and effort.
In the past, Snapdeal has partnered with icons like Nestle’s Maggi, HDFC Bank and bought Freecharge to open up more avenues in its business. They emerged to be a huge success and also became pillars to Snapdeal’s current ventures. Let’s see how other online marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart respond to Snapdeal’s tremendous growth.
