Exclusive partnerships with etailers- the answer for reaching target market effectively?

Ever since e-commerce has been established in India, the brick-and-mortar stores have witnessed a drastic fall in their market figures, revenue wise. With more and more products being launched via the online marketplaces, the foreseeable future of e-commerce is on the boom.

Recently, Motorola stated that it has sold a million plus smartphone handsets in the last five months after it began selling in India again. All of this was solely achieved due to Motorola’s exclusive partnership with the online megastore and e-commerce’s poster lad – Flipkart. “We believe these sales figures should put Motorola among the top five mobile brands in the country,” said Sachin Bansal, founder and CEO of Flipkart.

Coming to aid of the smartphone sector, IDC, a research firm stated that vendors shipped a total of 17.59 million handsets in the first quarter of 2014 whereas Nokia secured the fifth place with a 4% market share. These figures go onto prove how the Indian consumer has adapted to the trend of shopping online conveniently and has left behind the traditional, in-the-store shopping. When one has the convenience of enjoying the speed, easy payment options and the feeling of click-or-touch via a smartphone or tablet, the experience is definitely worth all the effort.

Specifically, for Motorola, the ‘only-online’ trend has proven highly successful. Moving on, a number of other companies too have jumped on the chariot and partnered with a variety of e-commerce players. This goes onto prove how e-commerce is now ruling the market structure for not only mobile phones but also for other products.

Following Motorola’s success story, Finnish smartphone maker Jolla, and India e-commerce marketplace Snapdeal.com, on Thursday announced an exclusive partnership to launch the Jolla smartphone in India. Not far behind, is Xiaomi which is often referred to as ‘Apple of China’ has made its maiden launch and flagship smartphone – Mi 3 which available in India, starting today, with an exclusive partnership with Flipkart.

Amazon now has an exclusive partnership with Samsung to sell the latter’s new smartphone – Samsung Galaxy K Zoom. Celkon Impex recently launched its Campus A35K smartphone in India in an exclusive partnership with Snapdeal.

It is to be noted that India, is the first market where companies such as Motorola has forayed into and have decided to stay away from offline retail market spaces. Until now, Motorola has launched three smartphone models in India, namely – Moto E, Moto G and Moto X.

Magnus Ahlqvist, corporate VP, Emea & Apac, Motorola Mobility stated that the company’s performance was phenomenal. “It proves that the business model that we chose was a really strong one. I don’t think we have achieved anything similar elsewhere,” he said.

Exclusive partnerships with online e-commerce companies would be the future of carrying out distribution process in India. Not just that, the cost savings through e-commerce are massive which is the key factor in the success stories that Motorola has witnessed.

Ahlqvist said Motorola had no plans of taking the offline retail route in the foreseeable future and would continue to strengthen its partnership with Flipkart with more product launches. Moto G was the first smartphone to be launched by the company in India in February and sold over 20,000 units in 15 minutes.

With online partnerships being the latest strategy being adopted by market giants and smaller scale industries likewise; what remains to be seen is the next big boom that the e-commerce industry shall witness.