By Zia Askari
At a time when channel partners are feeling the heat from the burgeoning e-commerce space, Flipkart, one of the biggest online retail marketplace is looking forward to working closely with the channel community.
“We are a marketplace and we would like to work closely with traders who want to leverage on our platform. They have to understand that with the help of our online platform, they can exponentially increase their radius of operations from 10 miles to the whole of country,” Michael Adnani, Vice President – Retail and Head of Brand Relations, Flipkart Internet Pvt Ltd.
Owing to a lot of vendors exclusively aligning with Flipkart, the platform is fast becoming a favored destination as far as smartphones shopping is concerned. However, according to various market experts, the overall sale of mobile phones from the online space still hovers around 7 per cent mark in India, while the rest is still coming from the offline channel model.
Commenting on this Michael said that, Flipkart is doing more than 7 per cent sales. “I can tell you that we are doing more than 7 per cent of the smartphone sales in India,” he added.
How Flipkart can help Traders?
Talking about how Flipkart technology platform can help the trader community, Michael said that they should not be fighting with e-Commerce and look for ways to partner and grow ahead.
“e-Commerce is not going to go away anywhere, and there are so many ways where we can help them. We have a whole lot of end customer related analytics and backend technology investments being done in order to make the platform more robust. Traders can partner with us and utilize all the benefits,” he added.
While there are many channel associations which are moving in different directions to tackle the threat from e-commerce segment, including creation of a national online marketplace, there is still very little headway.
Moving forward, there will be bigger e-commerce activity as most of the online ventures have secured huge funding from financial institutions and private investors. Traders and channel community will quickly have to find a way to live in togetherness.
