From daily deals to a marketplace and now a service platform, Snapdeal has anticipated, adapted and transformed like a chameleon over the years.
In a bid to stay on top, ecommerce biggie Snapdeal will develop a services platform, including utility payments and personal loans for its users. This step is the latest strategic move to trim down costs and get better profit margins so as to combat ferocious ongoing battle between global and national etailers.
Vice-president – Marketing of Snapdeal, Idi Srinivas Murthy said, “A lot of people look at e-commerce as a sub-set of the retail pie, we say No. India is one of the largest consumption economies in the world, and it will double in the next couple of years. That is the opportunity.”
If one looks at Snapdeal’s latest acquisitions, their strategy to buy companies that can significantly help to build their services platform is quite clear. In April this year, they secured a major stake in RupeePower, a marketplace for loans and cards. This marked Snapdeal’s entry into online financial services.
In the same month, Snapdeal pulled off one of biggest acquisitions in the Indian consumer Internet industry by acquiring Freecharge. This buy-out took them one step closer to their goal of venturing into services as Freecharge is an online recharge platform for prepaid mobile, data cards, dth and postpaid mobile bill payments.
In an earlier interview, Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl had revealed that the company is looking out to acquire more companies this fiscal year to stay ahead of Flipkart and Amazon.
Online service industry is thriving because people continually look for ways to get their job done without stepping out. Be it making bill payments, recharges, form filing or other errands, online transactions are on a high. Thus, a chance for online service providers to mint money.
While speaking about Snapdeal’s latest strategy, Technopak’s Chairman, Arvind Singhal shared his opinion, “The incremental cost of delivery of services are lower, and can potentially give better profitability or returns on investment. The objective is to control the enabling eco-system and create a pipeline of future revenue from services.”
The latest developments might give an impression that online marketplace won’t be given much attention. But that’s not the case. Snapdeal will continue to add more products and categories while simultaneously building its services platform too.
Editor team is specialized in introducing the marketplace content targeting the Indian online sellers. They plan and coordinate to bring the appealing content for the small businesses on how to partner with the e-commerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart and strategies for improving their online business.
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