Race to The Top Begins: Amazon Opens Seller Cafes Across 24 Cities; Flipkart Wants 50% Of India’s e-Fashion

By Mohul Ghosh On Sep 19, 2016

The oncoming festive season of Dussera-Diwali-Christmas-New Year is proving to be the final bastion for the ecommerce battle in India, atleast for 2016. Experts are observing this season for one primary reason: Among Amazon and Flipkart, which portal corners maximum market share to determine the winner in the race to the top?

Both of these mega portals have geared up to face this challenge, and lots of exciting announcements can be made in the coming days.

Flipkart Wants To Capture 50% of Online Fashion

Globally, as well as in India, Amazon has failed to make some serious dents in the lucrative fashion business. And Flipkart is all set to exploit this vulnerability to maximum extent.

Reports are emerging that ahead of the festive season, and on the back-drop of Big Billion Day sales day(s), Flipkart wants to target fashion category, and capture massive 50% of the market share.

And going by the preparation done by them, it seems a possibility as well.

After Myntra-Flipkart acquired Jabong in July this year, they have already cornered maximum market share as they collectively ship 30-35% of overall fashion sales online in India. Rs 350-400 crore is the gross sales of fashion related products on Flipkart, every month, whereas Rs 400-500 crore is the gross sales on Myntra-Jabong combined.

Together, Flipkart-Myntra-Jabong is able to churn out gross sales of Rs 900 crore every month, after deducting cancellations. And now, they want to increase this number to 20% more, so that they grab 50% market share in this niche, overtaking Amazon by a long way.

Rishi Vasudev, vice-president, head of Flipkart Fashion said, “Flipkart Fashion was launched in 2012 and today it commands the No. 1 position. We have the largest share of the online fashion market between 30-35%,”

As of now, Flipkart Fashion boasts of over 100 million searches every month, and they have listed 8 million products, constituting 60,000 brands, 5 million styles and this single vertical accounts for 15-20% of overall sales on Flipkart.

As per various experts, Flipkart will specifically target clothes and fashion related products during festive season advertisements; and Amazon will have to take notice of this development.

Overall, its a great news for consumers, who can now look forward to more options and be spoilt for choice.

Amazon To Open Seller Cafes Across 24 Cities

Meanwhile, Amazon is looking at a 360 degree view of the situation, and instead of focussing on one single niche, they are empowering their merchants for more sales and more revenues.

To assist merchants with instant help, Amazon India is opening seller cafes across 24 cities, which will provide on-ground support to vendors, sellers and merchants, and empower them with resources to make more sales.

As per Gopal Pillai, who is the GM of Seller Services in Amazon, these seller cafes will be used to recruit new merchants, help them paper-work, strategies and resources to help them scale up, fast.

This special arrangement has been done keeping in view the festive season, and surge in orders.

Some facts regarding Amazon’s recent initiatives to help sellers:

20,000 new sellers added to Amazon in the last 6 weeks, via special campaigns
Right now, Amazon has a massive network of 1.2 lakh sellers pan-India
Amazon has tied up with 12,500 stores across 50 Indian cities and expanded their delivery network by 5 times
Amazon has trained 1400 e-commerce specialists across 16 cities to instantly help sellers with selling their products online

As per a recent study, Amazon India will account for 20% of overall Amazon’s global sales, although it’s losing $1 billion every year.

However, Amazon India has been able to beat Flipkart for second straight month, they will need to do something extraordinary to stop Flipkart from gaining ground.

Initiatives like ‘Seller Cafes’ will definitely assist Amazon to strengthen their backbone, and help in long term.