Flipkart Vs Amazon Vs Snapdeal: Revenues & Losses Comparison

We all know online shopping in India is growing at a very fast clip. At the same time, there is an intense competition in ecommerce space, especially among the top 3 players. Another aspect that everyone is probably aware about is, all this aggressive pricing and discounts are being paid by Venture Capitalists’ pockets.

Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal, all of them have raised investments or have commitments of $1 Billion or more. This money is being burned to acquire new customers, offer discounts and pump up products on offer.

While we are all aware that these sites are losing money, you will be amazed to know the quantum of loss these ecommerce players have incurred.

Check out these 2 graphs below and be stunned.

[Data Source: Techcircle] Note: All figures are in INR Crore

Please note that the revenue figures above are not the price of products sold (GMV), as these are all marketplaces, and their revenues come from commissions they get from sellers or listing fees that they charge to list the products on their site.

GMV or Gross Merchandize Value represents the price of products sold and net revenues is just a fraction of that!

Flipkart leads the race with net revenue of 179 crore followed by Amazon at 168.9 crore and Snapdeal at 154.11 crore.

However, when it comes to losses, Flipkart leads by a much bigger margin and their loss for 2013-14 stands at Rs. 400 Crore. Comparatively, Amazon losses are pegged at Rs. 321.3 crore and Snapdeal had least losses of 3 with 264.6 crore

See  the graph below to understand how much loss each player incurs for every rupee in net revenues.

Flipkart leads the race here to losing 2.23 rupees for every 1 rupee of revenue. Amazon loses 1.90 and Snapdeal has least amount of losses at Rs. 1.72.

The question is, how long can this sustain – In my view not very long.

What do you think?

Yahoo India Launches Shopping Powered By Flipkart

Yahoo India Homepage today shows up a new section called “Shopping” and if you click on it, you will be led to Flipkart’s site, albeit with a purple-blue header which says – Flipkart.com in association with Yahoo India.

The site has a separate sub-domain on Flipkart – http://yahoo.store.flipkart.com

We are not really sure whether it was Flipkart who approached Yahoo or the other way around. But from what we can say it seems that, Flipkart wanted to tap on millions of Indian users who visit Yahoo site on regular basis.

Yahoo India Homepage is one of the most popular pages visited by Indians – Over 115 million visitors come to Yahoo India homepage every month (as per Similarweb) and most of them are direct visitors. From Flipkart’s perspective this becomes a great doorway for them to attract new visitors on their site.

On the other hand, in our view, Yahoo too stands to benefit quite a lot from this association. While we are not aware of the terms between Flipkart and Yahoo, every visitor that Yahoo sends to this co-branded marketplace, they will make revenue either through commission on sales or via number of impressions.

Interestingly, shoppers can use their existing Flipkart credentials to login to their site.

Whatever the deal between the two, both stand to benefit from this association. Flipkart adds new users and increases sales, while Yahoo makes additional revenue!

Gurmit Singh, managing director, Yahoo India, said “With easy access to Flipkart directly from the Yahoo homepage, we believe that the millions of users who visit the Yahoo network daily will now enjoy not only premium content, but also an exciting shopping experience.”

Mausam Bhatt, senior director, online marketing at Flipkart said, “We are always looking for innovative ways of engaging with the customer. Flipkart and Yahoo are both market leaders in their own space – and in a market where people are increasingly consuming content on digital platforms, a partnership like this helps bridge content and commerce to enhance the product discovery and purchase cycle for online shoppers,”

If you remember, Yebhi has exactly a similar sort of setup with IRCTC, however, that did not seemed to have worked too well, as IRCTC broke-off less than a year into the partnership.  IRCTC is right now looking for a new partner and has floated a new tenderfor the same purpose.