Ecommerce Battle: Flipkart Will Use AI To Predict Sales; Amazon’s Exclusive Smartphones To Have Prime, Kindle, Amazon Pay
As the new financial year started on April 1st, e-commerce battle is warming up in India. While Flipkart has decided to use Artificial Intelligence to predict consumer behaviour, Amazon will launch exclusive smartphones with their own products.
Flipkart: AI Will Predict Consumer Behavior
Flipkart has two distinct advantages over any other e-commerce portal, including Amazon: a massive database of 100 million users and a 6-year head start compared to Amazon India. (Flipkart was launched in 2007, while Amazon India came into existence in 2013)
Using these two factors, Flipkart will now use Artificial Intelligence to understand their consumers and to predict their behaviour.
Krishnendu Chaudhury, principal scientist and head of image sciences at Flipkart said, “We are trying to predict how many units of what we will sell. This is a very complex thing that is dependent on a variety of inputs such as price, discount or if an event, such as Diwali or Christmas is coming up,”
Considering that majority of these 100 million users are also smartphone users, Flipkart will now understand and decode their consumers’ purchasing power, socio-economic background and their shopping trends to introduce better, attractive products.
E-commerce has just entered into the high-tech scenario, and Flipkart is taking the lead here.
Amazon: Exclusive Smartphones With Amazon Products
Amazon India has decided to include their signature products into every smartphone sold exclusively on their platform, which has their exclusive rights.
And this will start with the exclusive sale of Moto G5 smartphones on Amazon India platform.
Three most popular Amazon products: Amazon Pay, Kindle and Prime Videos would be now pre-installed in every Moto G5 sold.
Explaining the rationale, Manish Tiwary, vice-president, category management, Amazon India said, “There are three features smartphones are heavily used for, other than calls. Shopping, watching videos, and reading and all of these are right there on top for Moto G5 with Prime Video, Kindle and Amazon Pay. We have very exciting brands coming in though we can’t talk about them now,“
Now, the question arises, why Amazon is doing this? And the answer lies in market domination.
Albeit for a short phase, but Amazon India has lost the smartphone battle against Flipkart, at least for the first quarter of 2017. As per data crunched by Counterpoint Technology Market Research, Amazon India’s market share in selling smartphones online fell to 27% from 33% in the last year, for the same period. At the same time, Flipkart’s market share in the same segment increased to 57% from 51% last year.
And Amazon India wants to improve this situation. This is the reason that we may see more exclusive smartphone launches by Amazon in near future, and they shall be pre-installed with Amazon products.
