Flipkart seeks tips from users to make inroads into smaller towns

Flipkart employees, including CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, will visit customer's homes across India

Flipkart is reaching out to customers from smaller towns to help figure how to grow its business beyond the large metros. The country’s largest e-commerce marketplace has kicked off a month-long programme in which top executives will meet customers to collect feedback on ideas to help drive the “next phase of growth”.

Claiming to have crossed the 100-million-customer mark last year, Flipkart believes that its next 100 million customers will come from smaller towns. As part of its 10th anniversary, Flipkart employees, including Chief Executive Officer Kalyan Krishnamurthy, will visit customer’s homes across India, especially those from tier II, III and IV towns.

“Customers are at the heart of everything we do, which is why all our work in the past decade was done to simplify and bring value to our customer’s life. As we dedicate this month to our customers, we would like to get to know them better by personally interacting with them,” said Krishnamurthy.

This isn’t the first time top executives at Flipkart will meet customers in person. It has been a yearly gesture for the founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal to personally visit customer’s homes and make deliveries of products during its ‘Big Billion Days’ sale.

Flipkart also launched Metronaut, its first private fashion label for men, just days after the launch of Divastri, a private label brand for women. Flipkart said the launch of Metronaut was based on data that showed men liked shopping for branded apparel online. By analyzing purchase and returns behaviour of men, Flipkart observed there was a drastic gap in the demand compared to goods available in the market.

Along with subsidiaries, Myntra and Jabong, Flipkart says it controls 70 per cent of the overall online fashion market in India, a claim which rival Amazon disputes.

Catering to customers from smaller towns and grabbing market share in high-margin verticals, such as fashion, is a growing trend not only at Flipkart, but in much of India’s fast growing e-commerce market. Even Amazon is betting big on online fashion and has launched two private labels — Symbol and Myx.

Further, Amazon says it achieved 90 per cent coverage of all pin codes in the country during its Diwali sale last year, proving that demand existed in all parts of India. 

It said it will better serve customers outside large metros by continuing to grow infrastructure, something which has absorbed over half of all its investments in the country so far.