DYANPRASARAK MANDAL’S COLLEGE

of art science & Commerce

E-COMMERCEby

Prasad Kamat

Roll no.14

M.Com I

(2010-2011)

Flipcart.COM

Introduction

What happens when two people with a strong techno-commercial background and a passion for books get tired of poor services of the limited number of online bookstores available?! Well, they join their hands together and establish a kind of online retail prodigy that begins humbly but soon becomes one of the most popular digital book store of the country selling at least one book every single minute!

Case in point- www.flipkart.com, a name that needs no introduction but for those who don’t think books are really their best friends, Flipkart is the largest online book store of the country selling more than 5lakh books in the past two years and has grown ten times over the last one year itself. Flipkart is an excellent example of first generation entrepreneurs identifying a business opportunity in an age old industry and using the internet as a medium to give it renewed scope for thriving.

The company was started in 2007 by former classmates in IIT Delhi and later colleagues at Amazon.com, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. The genesis of the thought to set up Flipkart came from the bad quality service provided by other digital book stores. As Sachin quotes- “Our business opportunity was to do better than our competition in terms of ‘service’. Hence, our main mission was to focus on customer service”. He continues, “As a start-up company with ambitions in the e-commerce domain, we had to choose a category that could facilitate getting started quickly. The low transaction size (as low as Rs.100/- or even lower) helped induce customer trials. With our strong technology background, we could keep the initial costs low.”

So while a strong and intelligent technology helped in keeping the operation cost low, customers were attracted by smart business

strategies like free shipping and offering extremely low cost books on the shelf as a minimum risk purchase.

Like any other start up, there were a number of challenges to be faced by Flipkart also. Suppliers were to be sourced, distributors were to be enlisted and employees were to be constituted. Apart from that, getting noticed amongst the existing competition and establishing your difference was also a major challenge.

 

Flipkart established its biggest USP as good customer service and offered advantages like very low costs, no hidden charges, free shipping and a very timely delivery. It developed a streamlined business process free of any bumps and kept the customer at its center. Sachin and Binny themselves being Computer Science graduates helped in facilitating the technological process. Their work experience at Amazon.com furnished with the necessary homework required before establishing any business. Thus began Flipkart.com, well prepared and well equipped, aiming to become a complete e-commerce operator.

Once the company is established, up and running, publicity or marketing becomes the crucial factor deciding on its fate. Believe it or not, in case of Flipkart, rather than opting for more expensive, bold marketing tools, the company chose to publicize only through word of mouth with the help of friends and family initially! It even opted for more conventional methods of offline marketing like distributing pamphlets and participating in trade fairs etc which gave a mixed response

Later, Flipkart advertised through Search Engine Marketing (SEO) and even through popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter by sending Promo Codes to communities established on them. All the efforts combined soon started giving fruits and the portal started receiving an increased number of hits everyday. The easy navigation and user friendly offers attracted not only new customers but also a large number of repeat customers.

Currently Flipkart has over 4 million titles listed, ranging across all categories such as Fiction, Non-Fiction, Literature, Educational, Professional and Technical, Religion and Philosophy, Entertainment, etc. The family of book buyers on Flipkart is spread across the country, with registered buyers in every city and small town today.  As a testimony to the superior customer experience, the company has consistently recorded repeat purchase rates of more than 50%.

The book market in India is pegged at Rs10,000 Crore out of which 1% is the online book market share. Out of the overall online sales, Flipkart currently has 20-25% of a market share. With the online payments becoming more secure and more and more people becoming comfortable with online shopping, the online segment is growing almost by 50% year on year. The process involved in online shopping for books has gone through drastic changes and is more secure right now. With Flipkart, once the order is placed online – the book is taken off the online inventory. In case of unavailability – it will be purchased from a supplier. The Book will then get packed and couriered on the same day. Flipkart is currently tied up with around 12 courier service providers and also uses the Indian Postal services to reach areas without courier providers.  Flipkart started as a very small company. To begin with, they had three centers across the country without any funding. Like mentioned earlier, in the past two years, the company has sold over 5 lakh books online and currently it sells one book every minute. Last year saw the company grow leaps and bounds by ten times and reach the position of number one online book seller in the country. As Sachin beams- “We reached number one status in two years, reached this position six months back. Also, being four times bigger than our nearest competitor, projects our growth. We started off small; today we have grown ten times over the last one year and aim to touch the Rs 25 Crore mark by March 2010"

After reaching the number one company in the country for the digital book market, Flipkart has ambitious plans for future. After conquering the books segments, the company now has set its sight on the online DVD, electronic gadgets and mobile phones market and soon plans to diversify into that segment.

A look of Flipcart.com

Flipcart.com has designed with a beautiful store front with balanced color and quick tabs. The site is very simple to browse & procedure for e shopping is very simple too with flipcart.com

We can easily find the required product from flipcart.com by using the categories or directly searching it by using search tab which can be seen right at the top of the page, The books could be also browsed by the author’s name also.

Further there are sub categories for searching books i.e. Books home, New releases, complete collection, pre-order, Best sellers, & recently sold. Also there is selectio0n of regional language available, languages like hindi, tamil and so on

It’s very easy to shop with flipcart.com, let’s have a look for it

Procedure for shopping

To buy any product from flipcart.com you are required to follow a simple procedure, as follows

1. Go to flipcart home page by typing www.flipcart.com in the

address bar

2. Select the required category, the categories available are

Books

Mobiles

Movies

Musics

Games

Cameras

(In this example lets select cameras)

3. Now select the desired product that you want to purchase

Then it will provide you with the detailed information about the

product selected by you

It will also tell you the status , whether the selected product is

available or not also the price of the product and other cost

attached with it i.e. shipping cost and so on

The time that could be required for delivery will be also shown

Even there is a space provided in order to write your review about

the product

Also you can share the product info with your friends by clicking

social networking sites(link) i.e. facebook.com or twitter.com

4. After selecting the product to be purchased, then click on the “buy this

now” tab in order to add the selected product to shopping cart.

The shopping cart shows the information regarding the purchases which

include:

Name of the item(s)

Its description

Price

Quantity

Other cost (if applicable)

Total amount payable

There is always an option available in the shopping char for further

shopping (i.e. to add more products in the cart)

5. After adding the number of purchases to be made to the shopping cart ,

the user have to proceed further by clicking to the “place order” tab,

It will then ask for the log in information (for members)

In case for non member s, they are required to sign up to create an

account first by providing required information ( name, address, email,

etc) & then log in.

Then click continue for further procedure

6. The next step is to provide the shipping address i.e. the address where the user whishes that the product(s) to be delivered.

7. The next is the order summery which will give the information regarding the entire sale package

8. Lastly the payment details which asks for the mode of payment to be selected, it can be:

Cash-on-delivery

Net banking Credit card Debit card DD/Cheque Other( as per the seller)

The user has to provide the information regarding the selected mode of payment

Confirmation

At the end the confirmation page will pop up after clicking on the pay tab & an email will be sent to the user giving all the details about the transaction