Snapdeal’s fashion business records 250% growth in 2015 (what else grew?)

Online marketplace, Snapdeal has announced that its fashion business was its most successful category in 2015, recording a 250% growth over the previous year which meant 1 in every 3 purchases on the Snapdeal platform was for apparel. What’s also intriguing is that the highest number of first time users visited via the fashion section.

Snapdeal’s women’s fashion segment witnessed a 220% growth, followed by men’s fashion which grew by 130%. The Children’s fashion category also improved at a 100% rate. It was identified that 70% of all ethnic women’s garment orders came from non-metro’s. Elsewhere, the inner-wear category recorded a 200% increase for women and 100% growth for men.

“Fashion category has grown tremendously for us this year. One of the key reasons for this exponential growth is our exclusive partnerships with notable brands such as Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri (TBZ), Ekta Kapoor’s Ek, Shoppers Stop, as well as our partnership with leading brands like Benetton, Jack & Jones, Vero Moda. Aside this, our special initiatives like tie-ups with government handloom corporations & industry bodies to list indigenous products has fuelled the growth in the category,” said Rahul Taneja, Vice President, Category Management, Snapdeal.

Top 5 selling fashion items:

• Sarees

• Dress material

• Men’s shoes

• Men’s watches

• Women’s kurtis

Top 3 selling precious jewellery goods:

• Pendants (mangalsutra)

• Rings

• Earrings

Most popular colours for apparel:

• Women = red, black & purple

• Men = black, blue & grey

Most Search for apparel on Snapdeal:

• 14% of total searches were related to ethnic women’s wear (sarees, dress material, suits)

• 12% of total searches related to men’s shoes (formals, trainers, sandals)

Snapdeal’s other success stories in 2015

At the start of festive period, Snapdeal aimed to overtake Flipkart and become India’s largest online marketplace by the end of the fiscal. We wonder how it’s doing? Anyway check out what Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal had to say about Snapdeal’s success over the last twelve months:

“We made phenomenal progress in terms of expanding the merchant base on our platform. We now work with 200,000 merchants. Sales grew very fast this year and it was complimented by our investments in enhancing delivery experience for customers. We have reduced delivery time by 70 per cent in the last 12 months and it can be brought down even further. Snapdeal’s investment in GoJavas has also helped in shrinking delivery time. We also launched our payments business which is doing really well. Freecharge has clocked 10 million mobile wallet users in a short span of time. The Freecharge acquisition was a major milestone for Snapdeal this year as it enabled us to become a payments company in addition to facilitating online sale of physical products,” said Rohit Bansal co-founder & COO, Snapdeal.