Flipkart: Indian E-commerce Giant with Cash-on-Delivery Model
Introduction to Flip Kart
Flipkart is an Indian e-commerce company headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka.
It was founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in 2007. In its initial years, Flipkart focused on online sales of books, but it later expanded to electronic goods and a variety of other products. Flipkart offers multiple payment methods like credit card, debit card, net banking, e -gift voucher, and the major of all Cash on Delivery. The cash-on-delivery model adopted by Flipkart has proven to be of great significance since credit card and net banking penetration is very low in India. Foundation date 2007 Headquarters Bangalore, India Area served India Founder(s) ? ? Sachin Bansal Binny Bansal Industry Internet, Online retailing
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Products Flipkart. com, Electronic Wallet, Mime360. com, Chakpak. com, Flyte Digital Music Store Services Electronic commerce Revenue 12 billion (US$220 million) (FY 2011–12) Employees 4500 Slogan(s) The Online Megastore
History
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi worked for Amazon. com before quitting and founding their own company. Initially they used word of mouth marketing to popularise their company. A few months later, the company sold its first book on flipkart. com—John Woods' Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.
Today, as per Alexa traffic rankings, Flipkart is among the top 20 Indian Web sites and has been credited with being India's largest online bookseller with over 11 million titles on offer. Flipkart claims to have had at least 100% growth every quarter since its founding. The store started with selling books and in 2010 branched out to selling CDs, DVDs, mobile phon es and accessories, cameras, computers, computer accessories and peripherals, and in 2011, pens & stationery, other electronic items such as home appliances, kitchen appliances, personal care gadgets, health care products etc. Further in 2012, Flipkart added.
C, air coolers, school supplies, office supplies, art supplies & life style products to its product portfolio. As of today, Flipkart employs more than 4500 people.
Funding
Initially funded by the Bansals themselves with INR 400,000, Flipkart has raised funding from venture capital funds Accel India (US$1 million in 2009) and Tiger Global (US$10 million in 2010 and US$20 million in June 2011). Flipkart. com, on August 24, 2012 announced the completion of its 4th round of $150 million funding from MIH (part of Naspers Group) and ICONIQ Capital.
The stated goal was to give Flipkart a social recommendation platform for buyers to make informed decisions based on recommendations from people within their social network. 2011: Mime360, a digital content platform company. DSMM Flipkart Page 5 of 25 ? ? 2011: Chakpak. com is a Bollywood news site that offers updates, news, photos and videos. Flipkart acquired the rights to Chakpak’s digital catalogue which includes 40,000 filmographies, 10,000 movies and close to 50,000 ratings. Flipkart has categorically said that it will not be involved with the original site and will not use the brand name. 012: Letsbuy. com is India's second largest e-retailer in electronics. Flipkart has bought the company for an estimated US$25 million. Letsbuy. com had been closed down and all the traffic of Letsbuy is diverted to Flipkart.
Business Results
Flipkart's reported sales were 40 million in FY 2008–2009, 200 million in FY 2009–2010 and 750 million for FY 2010–2011. In FY 2011–2012, Flipkart is set to cross the 5 billion (US$100 million) mark as Internet usage in the country increases and people get accustomed to making purchases online. Flipkart projects its sales to reach US$10 billion by year 2014.
On aver age, Flipkart sells nearly 20 products per minute and is aiming at generating a revenue of 50 billion (US$1 billion) by 2015.
About the Offerings
Clothing Footwear Mobiles & Accessories Computers Watches, Bags & Wallets Cameras Books Home & Kitchen Daily Personal Needs Gaming TV, Videos & Audio Music, Movies & Posters Baby Care & Toys Sports & Fitness ebook MP3 Downloads India is at the cusp of an e-commerce revolution and we'd like to keep Flipkart at the forefront as pioneers and trend-setters. DSMM Flipkart Page 6 of 25 Flipkart have leaped from being a start-up to a fast growing mid-sized company.
Backed by a strong funding of $31 million, Flipkart is rapidly expanding its network of warehouses, distribution centers, procurement operations, and 24X7 customer support teams. Flipkart p of operations is set to grow from five warehouses and 35 delivery centers to 25 warehouses and more than 60 delivery centers across the country. DSMM Flipkart Social Networking Youth RE-SELLING option for customers one of the main Buiness Objectives Middle class families Gathering an audience for local events Audience for events Community members can find an apartment to live in, ell their old car, bike ,music system, laptop or furniture, promote their small business Community Members local community within a city coming together, meeting, trading and helping each other in many ways Local Communities
Target Group
A humble beginning from books, Flipkart now has a gamut of products ranging from: Cell phones, laptops, computers, cameras, games, music, audio players, TV's, healthcare products, washing machines etc. etc. Still, Flipkart derives around 50% of its revenue from selling books online.
Flipkart is the Indian market leader in selling books both offline and online, it enjoys an online share of around 80%. The electronic items have a large number of players like Naaptol, Letsbuy, Indiaplaza, Tradus, Infibeam, Yebhi etc. The electronic market share is distributed among them in different unknown proportions. India has around 13. 5 crore internet users today where as the number of homes with Cable and Satellite (C&S) television is 10. 5 crore. The expected internet users will reach a figure o f 30 crore by 2014 and C&S homes are expected to be 14 crore by 2014.
Thus India has a tremendous internet growth and with the customers getting accustomed to e -commerce, the future of e-commerce sector is definitely rosy. An approximated 25 lac people hav e transacted online this year, the number is all set to increase with time. Also to mention most of the Flipkart customers use internet from PC's/Laptops to order goods. The use of mobile internet is very less at the moment, but with the advent of smart ph ones the use of mobile internet for e-commerce transactions will soar with time. India has 8 crore mobile net users at the moment, the number is expected to swell to 22. 5 crore by 2014.
Let’s discuss the factors that lead to the grand success of Flipkart: ? They always strove to provide great customer service. Flipkart customers are happier than with some of their competitors like Tradus. in, Indiaplaza. com; i have myself experienced this a couple of times. ? Their website is great, easy to use, easy to browse through the products, add products to wish list or to a cart, get product reviews and opinions, pre -order products, make payments using different methods, in short hassle- free and convenient. ? A very important point is that they introduced the option of cash on delivery and card on delivery.
This way people demonstrated more confidence in buying products. An interesting DSMM Flipkart Page 8 of 25 fact, today Flipkart sells 20 products/min and have a massive customer base, still mor e than 60% of the Flipkart's customers use Cash on Delivery and card on delivery methods. This is because of two reasons, one is many people do not know how to make payments online. And secondly people do not have immense trust in e-commerce in India. Flipkart also provides a 30 day replacement guarantee on its products and EMI options to its customers for making payments. Flipkart's reason of success is that it has a great customer retention rate, it has around 15 lac individual customers and more than 70% customers are repeat customers i. e. they shop various times each year. The company targets to have a customer base of 1 crore by 2015.
Flipkart’s Marketing Strategy
Flipkart has been mostly marketed by word of mouth advertising. Customer satisfaction h as been their best marketing medium. Flipkart very wisely used SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Google Ad-words as the marketing tools to have a far reach in the online world. Flipkart. om official Facebook page has close to 9 lac 'likes'. Flipkart recently launched a series of 3 ads with the tag line - "No Kidding No worries". Kids were used to create the adverts to send out the message - if a kid can do it, you can also do it. The message is very clear to make people more comfortable with Flipkart, to generate a great customer relationship and loyalty on the basis of great product prices and excellent customer service. All in all to create a great customer experience. DSMM Flipkart Page 9 of 25.
Flipkart Campaigns
DIGITAL AD CAMPAIGNS Primarily flipkart worked on online advertising ? ? ? SEO (most effective) SEM (pay per click) Facebook (needs better handling) Twitter
Print Media Ads
Ad Agency: Happy Creative Service Flipkart. com is out in the market with a new campaign titled, "Shopping ka Naya Address". The campaign created by Happy Creative Services intends to take online shopping to a wider audience this time and cover the non-metro areas of the country. The TVCs, which extends the 'kids as adults' concept followed by Flipkart. om the last time, stress on highlighting vital benefits of shopping on Flipkart. com viz, cash on delivery, 30 day replacement policy, and guarantee of original products. DSMM Flipkart Page 11 of 25 The first TVC shows three generations of a family in one room wherein the kid (from the third generation) is receiving a mobile phone that he had ordered for his grandfather through Flipkart. com. His father (the second generation) expresses his apprehensions over buyi ng something online to which the old man (first generation) affirms that he trusts Flipkart. com.
The man insists how one can buy something merely by looking at a picture online to which his wife retorts that they got married the same way, as a matter of fact; by looking at each other's pictures. The backdrop suggests that Flipkart. com is the new place to shop from.
Objective of the Campaign
The aim is to popularize the brand name Flipkart like Xerox became generic to the product category and also became a verb for photocopying The plot came through from Flipkart’s customer feedback stories, where customers have told the company where and how they have used Flipkart to save their skin
This campaign has a total of nine films, while two focus on the customer experience, the rest are meant to illustrate the new categories Flipkart has entered into The ad using children as adults has become a mnemonic that the Flipkart campaigns are now being identified with, much like the pug has become intrinsic to Vodafone.
The Challenges in the Communication
- Differentiate from Others Being Humorous
- To differentiate from mighty impressive ads by Quikr, Jabong, OLX
Many e-commerce portals have used umour as the primary ingredient for campaigns earlier.
Online / Social Media Marketing
Flipkart is a very social media focused brand and they wanted to create a high- level of engagement around the social media platforms. The campaign was unveiled after a high engagement teaser phase on social media with five short teaser videos on YouTube and Facebook. Several conversations began about what Bob is possibly up to, a hash tag #Shoppingkanayaaddress was also promoted on Twitter.
The hash tag was also around the new advertisement where all the people who had seen the viral advertisement went on to see the complete advertisement.
Results Advertisements Goes Viral
The campaign was unveiled after a high engagement teaser phase on social media with five short teaser videos on YouTube and Facebook. ? Several conversations began about quality of Flipkart #Shoppingkanayaaddress was also promoted on Twitter. service, a hash tag The hash tag was also around the new advertisement where all the people who had seen the viral ad went on to see the complete advertisement.
Digital Media Analys
Facebook Analysis
The analysis is been done by using socialdon. com and simplymeasured. com. For analysis a virtual server is been used to fetch data from Facebook from 21st Feb 2013 to 21st March 2013.
Cite this Page
Flipkart: Indian E-commerce Giant with Cash-on-Delivery Model. (2017, Jun 30). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/flipkart-ad-campaign/
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