Flipkart Ready For Fireworks

Flipkart is streamlining 2 key parts of its ecommerce empire and bringing them into the core business ahead of the festive sales – integrating the technology and product teams for Cleartrip (travel) and Flipkart Health+ (epharmacy biz) into the core Flipkart platform.

But that’s not the only new thing at Flipkart in recent times.?

The company has ventured into lending as well as fashion ecommerce, where it ironically competes with PhonePe and Myntra . It has also entered other verticals since 2022 to become the everything platform or a consumer super app. Will it pay off in the 2023 festive season?

Is Flipkart A Super App?

When Flipkart acquired Cleartrip in April 2021 and SastaSundar in November 2021, it was a pretty big signal that the company was looking to go all out in the digital commerce space, targeting key growth categories.

The new tight and linear structure is the latest move by Flipkart to restructure its business, where we have seen plenty of developments since December 2022, when PhonePe was hived off as a separate business by majority shareholder Walmart.

Even though Flipkart’s grocery business did not manage to make a dent in the quick commerce and hyperlocal space, these two acquisitions allowed it to compete with 亚马逊 more directly. The addition of travel and epharmacy has made Flipkart a well-rounded marketplace that touches key parts of the digital commerce value chain.

Flipkart’s Fintech Flavour

Perhaps most importantly, Flipkart is earmarking around $15 Mn–$20 Mn for an in-house lending marketplace. This marketplace is said to be coming later this year as a separate entity.

Like most of its rivals, the company will provide personal loans of up to INR 5 Lakh for consumers.

The ecommerce giant will leverage the combined user base of Flipkart and Myntra to reach an audience of close to 300 Mn, and shopping data and behaviour will be a key data differentiator for Flipkart in competing against the likes of Navi , Moneyview , CRED , Capital Float, Kissht , Paytm and others in the consumer loans space.

The company has partnered with Coverfox for insurance as well.?

But running a fintech marketplace for lending or insurance requires a totally different skill set and again, Flipkart is running very close to PhonePe in many of these aspects. It remains to be seen how deep Flipkart takes its fintech play.?

Festive Season Boost

For Flipkart and indeed other marketplaces, the festive season sales are as critical as it gets. The sales see aggressive competition — Amazon brought forward the dates of the Great Indian Festival to match Flipkart’s sale dates.

Meesho’s festive sale will start on October 6, two days before Flipkart or Amazon. Snapdeal has launched a week-long sale from October 8 too. There’s little doubt that JioMart and Tata CLiQ will also follow suit.

So it’s unsurprising that Flipkart has decided to push the accelerator on the revenue front for travel and epharmacy and put it within the central architecture.

Read the full article on Inc42.