While the eCommerce big daddy Amazon has officially entered the Indian market, Indian eCommerce players have had some major developments as well.
After shutting down its Flyte Music Store, it appears that Flipkart has has shut down that Flyte brand altogether. eBooks on Flipkart, which earlier were called as Flyte eBooks are now called Flipkart eBooks (Hat tip @narenbalaji).
Besides this, when we checked the website, we noticed that Flipkart has also stopped offering electronic products such as Air Conditioning, Refrigerators, and Television Sets. While links to these categories on Flipkart have been removed from their homepage, the individual listings now displays “discontinued” tag on its products.
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Homeshop18.com claims to have sold 1.3 lakh tablets and 12.30 lakh mobiles phones, including 3.69 lakh smartphones in the last fiscal, according to a report by PTI (via The Hindu). As per the report, Delhi-NCR topped the list followed by Mumbai, Kanpur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad in the mobile phone segment. When it came to the smartphone segment, Delhi-NCR again topped the list followed by Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.
The company also claimed that when it came to products like books, apparels and footwear, smaller cities were giving stiff competition to its counterparts in metros and big cities. Bhubaneshwar and Jodhpur reportedly bought 20% more books than the entire state of Kerala. Patna also saw more fashion and accessories related orders than Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Ahmedabad.
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Following its investment in Snapdeal.com, eBay has also partnered with the eCommerce site that will allow eBay to gain access to Snapdeal’s 20 million registered users, logistics software and distribution network, reports WSJ (paywall). Snapdeal Co-Founder Kunal Bahl told the publication that Snapdeal will offer limited number of products on eBay India and eBay too will list its merchandise on Snapdeal, following the partnership.
Besides this, in an interview with AllthingsD, Bahl had claimed that the company receives 14-15 million monthly visits, although the company is not profitable yet. He also claimed that Snapdeal will do a $400 million revenue in gross merchandise value this year, out of which Snapdeal gets only 5-15% cut.
Download: Structuring Of Investments In eCommerce Businesses In India – A MediaNama and Arkay & Arkay