Flipkart Is Focusing On New Customers This Festive Season; Will Amazon Follow Suit?

This festive season, India’s largest ecommerce portal: Flipkart has decided to tweak and twist their strategy. As per confirmed reports coming in, Flipkart will go full ballistic to entice and enchant new users, rather than focusing on existing users.

This means that new ecommerce shoppers can expect some real fireworks this festive season.

Will Amazon India also follow suit and focus on new users? Or, have they already started the process? We will soon find out..

Flipkart’s New Mission: Focus New Users!

Ever since Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart took charge effective June, 2016, their focus has been to encourage existing users to shop more. They have a massive user base of 120 million customers, and it seems an appropriate strategy.

And it worked too.

In the last festive season sales, Flipkart had claimed massive victory over Amazon, as they declared that they were able to sell 80% more goods, in terms of value.

Approximate Rs 5000 crore worth of goods were sold by Flipkart, in the last festive season.

Buoyed by the results, Flipkart has now decided to focus on new users, rather than existing users this festive season. Maybe they are assuming that existing users will anyways buy from Flipkart.

Smrithi Ravichandran, senior director, Flipkart has confirmed this development, as she said that they will be aiming to grow new users in a range of three-digit level.

She said, “Last year’s Big Billion Days was a lot about tapping into your existing user base, a lot about reactivating lapsed customers,”, adding, “But this year’s Big Billion Days will be about a mixture of growing our repeat customers and also about growing new users in triple digit numbers.”

The Logic Behind This Strategy

Explosion of new Internet users in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, thanks to dirt cheap data packs from Jio, Airtel and BSNL seems the root cause behind Flipkart’s focus on new users.

They are aware that the new users of Internet have experienced the power of Internet, and Dussera/Diwali is the apt occasion to lure them into the world of online shopping.

Smrithis said, “Because of the telecom players making inroads into the Tier 2-3 cities and towns, over the past few months we have seen a huge increase in the number of Tier 2-3 shoppers.”

Is Amazon Also Following Suit?

Not openly, but if we closely scrutinize Amazon’s latest salvo regarding their discounts and offers, we may find a subtle inclination towards new users.

For instance, they have announced a bonanza of Rs 2,00,000 for new users, who download their app and start shopping.

However, in a further change to strategy, Amazon has decided to spend less on marketing this year, and rather focus on offering discounts and special offers, for both new and old customers.

Amazon is confident that this year’s festive season would be their biggest till date.

Amazon India chief Amit Agarwal said, “We are pretty confident that this will be our biggest shopping season ever…in our four-year history (in India). At a high level if I compare this year’s Great Indian Festival with last year, we’ve added more than 80 million products and grown selection two times. It’s like adding one whole Amazon in the last one year for our customers,”

This is indeed interesting, because Paytm has already declared whooping Rs 1000 crore for discounts and special offers this festive season.

Who will win the ultimate battle this festive season?

Do let us know your opinions by commenting right here!