Amazon vs Flipkart: Which e-commerce giant attracts more eyeballs?

The past year has seen the rivalry between Amazon and Flipkart further intensify. From funding to shopping extravaganzas, the e-commerce behemoths went all out to outdo each other.

With both parties contesting third-party research findings about market share, the jury is still out on who sold more products.

But a look at a few other metrics provides some interesting insights on how the e-commerce giants grab eyeballs.

According to data from three independent platforms, Amazon’s app and website are more popular than rival Flipkart’s offerings.

Between November 2016 and October 2017 – the 12-month period for which the latest data is available – Amazon was consistently ahead of Softbank-funded Flipkart on desktop and mobile browser visits, app downloads and average daily active app users.

Amazon ended October last year with 5.4 million downloads for the month to Flipkart’s 4 million, according to app metrics tracking website App Annie (The number includes both Android and iOS downloads, but Apple has a minuscule market share in India).

Last October, Amazon and Flipkart had each crossed 100 million cumulative app downloads.

However, adding Flipkart’s subsidiaries PhonePe (digital payments) and Myntra and Jabong (both fashion) to the mix will see India’s largest e-commerce company well ahead of Amazon on this parameter. Each of those apps has between 10 million and 50 million downloads.

Google’s Play Store provides a wide range data for the cumulative app downloads. While downloads for e-commerce rival Snapdeal’s app range between 50 million and 100 million, smaller players such as Paytm Mall and Shopclues have between 10 million and 50 million downloads each.

Customer retention
According to data from digital marketing analytics firm SimilarWeb, around 4.8% of users who installed the Amazon app visited it daily. This also means that more users visit the Amazon app daily than Flipkart and Snapdeal combined.

But even as the overall app customer base grew, both Flipkart and Amazon struggled to sustain regular interest. Between November 2016 and October 2017, Flipkart saw a particularly sharp drop – from 5.6% to 3.2% – in daily active users on its app. In the process, it also lost its leadership position on this front to Amazon.

But Flipkart says quantity isn’t the priority when it comes to viewers.

“Flipkart focuses more on quality of traffic coming to its app, mobile site and website properties rather than traffic volume,” said a Flipkart spokesperson. “While traffic volume can be bought with marketing dollars, the majority of our user traffic comes to us on its own. And this traffic is of higher quality with a much higher user intent to purchase, directly leading to higher sales.”

Satish Meena, senior forecast analyst at market research firm Forrester Research Inc, warned against reading too much into these numbers.

“App downloads could be the result of paid advertisements,” he said. “If we assume that Flipkart has higher sales, that means Amazon’s conversion rate of traffic to sales is below par. But the traffic gap is big enough between them that the players could still be equals in terms of sales.”

He said that customers of Amazon Prime – its paid membership service – are high spenders and an estimated 30% of Amazon’s customers are Prime subscribers.

Another analyst with an international research company, who did not wish to be identified, said that Amazon could be ahead of Flipkart on sales on a standalone basis.

The analyst noted that Myntra and Jabong (which combined have more than a billion dollars in gross merchandise sales), together with PhonePe, could see a consolidated Flipkart beat its rival.

​​Browser traffic
Amazon’s browser traffic is impressive too.

Data from Similarweb shows Amazon’s monthly desktop visits rising nearly 25% to 102 million between November 2016 and October 2017.

During the same period, Flipkart saw its monthly desktop visits go up from 50 million to 60 million.

However, browser visits may not be a fair comparison. In 2015, Flipkart had focused on selling via its app while considering shutting down its website altogether. It has not managed to regain its leadership position in web traffic since then.

Before launching its existing web application on the Chrome browser, Flipkart had even briefly shut down its mobile site.

On mobile browsers, Amazon had around 340 million visits in October 2017, more than doubling its tally in a year. Flipkart, too, doubled its monthly visits in that period but only notched up 120 million views.

“Amazon.in was the most visited destination as per all standard traffic reports,” said an Amazon India spokesperson. “We know that our deals that already draw the maximum online traffic have a huge impact on customers’ buying patterns. ”

​​Continuing trend?
Despite Amazon’s clear advantage till October last year, it’s not clear whether the trend is continuing.

Multiple visits to the Google Play Store in January this year found Flipkart and PhonePe among the top 10 most popular apps on several days. Amazon did not find a place in the top 50. Myntra was also consistently among the top 50 most popular apps.

Forrester Research’s Meena pointed out that Amazon had led Flipkart in a consumer survey on customer satisfaction done by the research firm in 2016 and had strengthened its position as the top-rated platform in 2017 as well.

“There is no way we can track consumer spending though,” he said.

Harish HV, partner at accounting giant Grant Thornton, says the real numbers are hard to come by.

Between India and the US, this startup combines social networking and ecommerce for travellers

TravelUR aims to make travel more memorable and hassle-free by offering a platform for travel-related services and social engagement.

Photo by Steven Lewis on Unsplash.

What Amazon is to retail, TravelUR aims to be for travel.

TravelUR is targeting every traveller who wants to have a record of their travel experiences. Launched in May 2017 in Arizona, US, this startup aims to be a platform for end-to-end travel-related services and social engagement.

TravelUR’s services include online flight tickets, domestic and international holiday packages, bus tickets, hotel reservations, and more on website and app. It also enables digital storage of all travel-related media, which you can share digitally with friends without risking privacy.

Not surprisingly, both co-founders are avid travellers. Sunil Konduru, who has 25 years of corporate experience, is an extensive traveller, and has lived in Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and North America. Sekhar Kolla, who founded an IT consulting services company, and has single-handedly grown it to multimillion-dollar business, is a keen traveller. Both of them are now settled in the US.

Having worked for global corporates for close to 20 years, Sunil and Sekhar were sure they wanted to do something they were passionate about: travel. They are supported by a co-founding team, advisory board, and technology leadership team with extensive travel domain expertise. TravelUR, which has raised $1.5 million till date from family and friends, now has offices in Pennsylvania and Hyderabad.

Tech for the travel lover 

According to Sunil, travel experiences are scattered in terms of planning and memories. “After talking to many frequent travellers and noticing from our own experiences, we came up the idea of combining social engagement with all travel services to make every travel a lifetime digital memory,” he says.

Since the idea of TravelUR evolved from the individual traveller’s point of view, the name Your Travel or Travel UR was a natural choice.

Sunil Konduru and Sekhar Kolla, co-founders of TravelUR

Building a single platform combining social engagement and travel services was a challenge for the team in the initial days. “We developed all APIs that would integrate with other service providers. Doing it ourselves, we understood the inner nuances of the entire value chain,” Sunil says.

TravelUR storage is driven through PostgreSQL with Bootstrap frontend framework (JS, CSS, HTML5), jQuery and is supported by Ajax, PHP backend using Code Ignitor. The hardware is powered by Microsoft Azure web services. They are planning to release native Android and IoS apps in April.

Redefining e-commerce for travel

TravelUR mainly serves as a travel networking space and helps with destination research. Members can create their profile with personal travel preferences, share travel experiences and real-time travel updates, and meet other like-minded travellers just like on a social network.

Additionally, TravelUR combines social engagement and travel-related e-commerce services with an analytics-based platform with AI integration. It aims to give value to both users and travel service providers. They claim to have already established tie-ups with the best hotels, flights, and other travel services providers.

After having studied user-preferred features through global surveys and interactions with passionate frequent travellers, they are developing unique features in this regard. For instance, TravelUR analyses user choices, travel interests, demographics, and behaviour, which enables travel service providers to market their services and offers by targeting the right user base.

“We plan to engage all age groups from various locations with attractive customised vacation packages. We are more focused in socially active members and groups, and would want to leverage from their travel experiences,” Sunil adds.

The vast ecosystem

Being based in the US has given a specific advantage to TravelUR, which aims to scale globally.

Sunil explains, “We would like to get the best out of both worlds and leverage the advantages of getting to know the latest trends in the travel industry and align with global expansion strategy.”

TravelUR currently has over 35,000 registered users and has generated over $150,000 in the last nine months. At present they provide 185 vacation packages across 880 destinations in 32 countries globally.

Apart from all the travel business stakeholders like airlines, hotels, and travel agents, TravelUR aims to include all the socially active travellers/groups for last-mile connectivity. They have developed APIs that would integrate with all the other service providers.

A clear business model

TravelUR faces direct and indirect competition from Trip Advisor, Facebook, WAYN, Kayak, Makemytrip, and ClearTrip. In fact, Sunil says that “revenue vs social traction” was a big dilemma initially.

Team TravelUR

“We adopted a conservative approach for TravelUR and aimed for both social and revenue traction in the initial days to ensure that the team was motivated towards achieving tangible goals. Our aim is to be social first, and then a service provider,” he says.

To grow the existing product line, scale up operations, and market at global scale, TravelUR is planning to raise pre-Series A equity funding for the next 18 months of growth, especially for customer acquisition and marketing in India and the US. Sunil says that they are in discussions with some VCs active in India. They want to build their technology and expand their 35-member team, while scaling up existing partnerships and building new ones.

In 2018, TravelUR is eyeing one million users and a presence in 2,000 destinations. Way to go!

Online shoppers beyond metros grow 3x, drive e-commerce growth

Indian e-commerce is starting to mature, it would seem

Although a wide customer base is essential to recover the cost of customer acquisition, over the years, the industry has focused on Tier I cities for sales. But, according to a study by consulting firm RedSeer, the number of online shoppers outside metro cities in India are growing by more than three times as compared with their Tier I counterparts.

Accordingly, the number of shoppers from these cities made up nearly 41 percent of overall online shoppers in 2017. The number of unique shoppers in metro cities in 2017 stood at 11 percent, while other Tier I cities accounted for 18 percent. For Tier II cities and beyond, this number stands at 34 percent.

The study says this will be a significant lever for the growth of e-tailers in the Indian market in 2018 as well. “With the sharp increase in the number of online users due to the Jio effect the overall industry benefited. Key sectors saw good growth, and there was a significant shift observed in the business models of some sectors to ensure better consumer experience,” it adds.

Low internet penetration

The study also states that although the growth has been fair so far, there is a still a significant opportunity for the many categories in the e-commerce sector, as a majority of them has less than 10 percent online penetration.

While the sector is showing clear signs of growing, it is still being driven by discounting. The online fashion industry in India is worth $3.5 billion at present, and the other e-commerce verticals, together are worth $14.5 billion. The online grocery vertical is worth $950 million.

The problem, however, is that for these categories, online penetration is still less than 5 percent, whereas travel reservations and hotels, due to their proven value, have 100 percent penetration. Also, awareness about the pros of e-commerce is still low among the rural middle class, which is a challenge. Although efforts like Amazon’s assisted e-commerce model – Udaan – which was launched in 2015, enable customers to buy on Amazon through small retail stores (through partners like StoreKing and Vakrangee) in rural India, the initiative remains the only one of a kind.

More than discounts, better connectivity, and infrastructure are essential to bring new customers on board. The bigger players are still developing their logistics network to provide faster delivery. Experts believe that while services like Amazon Prime – which promise one-day delivery - can bring in customer loyalty, bringing in new members for this subscription service will demand more warehouses with a larger selection. Since the majority of Indian population lives outside metro cities, a growing customer base in these regions is definitely good news for e-commerce.

Welspun India sets up US arm to invest in e-commerce firms

Textile firm Welspun India has incorporated a wholly-owned subsidiary in the US to invest in e-commerce companies. 

"The company has incorporated a wholly-owned subsidiary Welspun Nexgen Inc registered with the state of Delaware, US having paid up capital of USD 4.25 million to make investment in e-commerce companies," Welspun India said in a BSE filing. 

The firm however did not elaborate on the matter. 

Shares of Welspun India were trading 2.23 per cent higher at Rs 73.40 per scrip on BSE. 

How the e-commerce sector performed in 2017

Moreover, terms like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning came into the fray, and are all set to become the new normal. It’s been a whirlwind of a year for Indian e-commerce! So, I decided to sum up the performance of the Indian e-commerce industry in 2017.

The Indian e-commerce industry is riding a rapid growth wave and its effects in the past one year alone have been huge. In 2017, we saw the entry of global giant Alibaba, the launch of PayTm Mall and a slew of app first e-commerce brands. Meanwhile, the draught in funding forced many brands to shift focus from driving GMV to revenue growth & profitability.

Moreover, terms like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning came into the fray, and are all set to become the new normal. It’s been a whirlwind of a year for Indian e-commerce! So, I decided to sum up the performance of the Indian e-commerce industry in 2017.

Surge in wallet usage

The cash-crunch caused by demonetization forced a surge in cashless methods like mobile wallets, debit/credit cards and net banking. According to a survey by CashKaro.com, almost 50% respondents switched from cash on delivery to digital payments, mobile wallets reaped colossal benefits. According to Business Insider, wallet payments forerunner PayTm witnessed transactions worth 120 crore per day only 12 days post demonetization. Today digital payments have become an essential part of urban India’s day-to-day life; fast spreading to the rest of the country.

The rise of niche stores

Online shopping portals like MamaEarth, TeaFloor and Coolwinks grabbed a sizeable chunk of the market. Sitting on a higher rung on the e-commerce giant chain, Nykaa, Myntra, FirstCry, UrbanLadder and LensKart launched brick & mortar stores becoming ‘Omni-channel’ retailers. Meanwhile, Flipkart, went on an acquisition spree adding fashion portals Jabong and Myntra to its kitty.

Mobile takes center-stage

In 2016, with the advent of 4G and lower subscription costs, mobile phones became the preferred device for shopping. As of 2017, mobile and internet penetration is such that one out of three people in tier I and II cities use their smartphones to shop online. In 2017, 82% of shopping queries were made through mobile devices, compared to 76% in 2016, according to a study by Assocham and Deloitte. Secure payment gateways, availability of alternate payment methods and offers on mobile payments have all contributed to this increase in mobile e-commerce. As internet and smartphone adoption continues to rise across the country, use of mobile as an online shopping platform is expected to cross $50 billion in value by the end of 2018 from the current level of $38.5 billion.

Growth of artificial intelligence

Technological advancements in machine learning made it possible for the e-commerce industry to adopt artificial intelligence (AI). AI has majorly affected customer service for e-commerce, bringing companies closer to consumers than ever before. E-commerce portals are using chat bots to personalize experiences while acquiring insights about consumer behavior. Major players such as Flipkart and Amazon aim to use AI for product recommendations and enhanced user experience.

As we walk into a more tech-centric era, we can expect these trends to snowball further. Combining trends from 2017 and predictions for 2018, its full steam ahead for e-commerce and I can’t wait to see what 2018 has in store.