As we move into the digital age, online shopping is becoming more and more popular. After all who wouldn’t like browsing and shopping for whatever you need from a single space and from the comfort of your home? This boom in the popularity of online shopping has given birth to many e-commerce websites. Flipkart is one of them. Flipkart is one of India’s leading e-commerce website functioning today. Established by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in October 2007. Its headquarters is based in Bengaluru. When Flipkart first commenced business, it primarily focused on selling books online. From this, they expanded into other categories like electronics, fashion, cosmetics etc. The company now boasts of an inventory of about 80+ million products ranging from laptops, mobile phones, and groceries to clothing, shoes, and jewelry. Flipkart now has warehouses in 21 states so as to meet the needs of their customers and to provide them an exemplary online shopping experience. As of 2019, over 100 million customers use Flipkart for their daily shopping needs. Around 10 million shoppers use Flipkart every day on an average with 8 million orders being shipped every month.
However, Flipkart hasn’t achieved this success overnight. It was a culmination of hard work and determination of the two founders who are both IIT –Delhi alumni. The first ever book sold on Flipkart was “leaving Microsoft to change the world” by John Wood and it is said that it was packed by Sachin Bansal and delivered by Binny Bansal. It is also said that they used to write fake reviews of books so as to attract more customers. Certainly, They sure have come a long way since then.
The game changer for Flipkart was the “Big Billion Day sale” which was started in 2015. They sold products worth $200 million dollars in these three days. This helped them fly past the market share of Amazon and catapulted them in big league e-commerce websites category. In today’s times, Flipkart’s biggest competition is e-commerce giant Amazon and they share a deep- cut rivalry.
Recently, Flipkart has been acquired by the American retailing mammoth Walmart which is all set to revolutionize the Indian retail market, bringing in a larger variety of goods at a much lower price. Walmart paid almost $16 billion for 77% of stake in Flipkart in the world’s largest ever e-commerce deal. The future looks extremely bright for Flipkart and the world eagerly waits for the company’s next steps.
