Flipkart eyes 70% share of India’s e-commerce market

India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, Flipkart, is looking to extend its lead over rival Amazon during this festive season and is targeting a share of 70 per cent of the country’s online shopping market.

With a $4-billion war chest, Flipkart is open to burning cash to corner significant market share and post a disproportionate lead over Amazon. The centrepiece of Flipkart’s strategy is to push sales of smartphones, a category that is well-known as a money loser for e-commerce companies.

“We had set an ambitious market share target of 70 per cent and we should get to around 65 per cent with Flipkart alone and 70 per cent along with Myntra and Jabong,” said Smrithi Ravichandran, senior director at Flipkart. “Big Billion Day forms a large portion of the target for this one month and on the basis of the past one and a half day’s numbers, we are on track to achieving our goals.” Flipkart said it sold over 1.3 million smartphones within the first 20 hours of the category opening for the sale. This was twice the number of smartphones Flipkart sold during the same period last year.

Before the start of the festive sale, Amazon had claimed that it has already overtaken on every metric possible. Both companies have an ongoing war of words, asserting that they are larger than the other.

Flipkart claims most of the heavy lifting will be done by the smartphone category in which it aims to capture 75 per cent market share among online sellers. The category will drive 50 per cent of its overall gross merchandise value (GMV) during the next one month, while accessories and electronics will drive another 10 per cent of its overall GMV.