Nearly a quarter of new customers across the Flipkart group comes from its one-year-old social commerce app, said Shopee, a senior executive at the e-commerce firm.
The group has several apps, including the Flipkart app, Myntra, payments app PhonePe and travel service app Cleartrip.
“We had set an audacious target of 100 million users to be on the platform by the end of the year, and we are well on course to achieve that,” Prakash Sikaria, Flipkart’s senior vice president (growth and monetization), told.
Shopsy, which is in heated competition with Meesho on a zero-commission model and is targeted at price-conscious customers, was launched last year with all sellers on Flipkart. But Sikaria said that the rise of Shopee hasn’t cannibalized Flipkart’s business in any way, as 70% of Shopee sales come from its unique sellers.
“We had this advantage to start this platform with all the Flipkart selection, but we knew that this selection would not work just for completion’s sake. So, we have done to build relevant selection over time,” he said.
In January, Flipkart chief executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy said that growing Kirana and Shopee would be the company’s priority this year. He said at the time that “there was no such thing as social commerce” and that he saw Shopee as an extension of commerce to a different set of users.
The seller base on Shopsy has remained around 250,000 since December last year, but in the previous six months, a 2.7x increase in units sold and a fourfold increase in monthly new customer base have been registered.
Even though the reseller model, which Meesho popularized in the market, was at the core of Showpsy’s offering, Sikaria said that two-thirds of Showpsy’s business came from direct sales to the end customer.
After the entry of Flipkart into the zero-commission social commerce business, Amazon India in April bought Bengaluru-based Glowroad, which is into a similar business, in an all-cash deal.