Flipkart unfazed as Google, WhatsApp plan to enter e-commerce market

With Google and WhatsApp making their first attempt at entering the e-commerce market this year, major players like Flipkart are hardly worried.

“While Flipkart has made it (e-commerce) seem very easy, it is not,” said Nishant Gupta, head — Flipkart Marketplace.

“The kind of infrastructure that we have been able to build over the last many years, the biggest investment areas for us have been supply chain and technology. 

These are very, very hardcore businesses. These are not something that somebody can just say that I want to do this, and I’ll be able to do this or just because I have money, I can solve the problem,” he added. 

Both Google and Facebook-owned WhatsApp are working with small sellers and merchants to help them set up their digital stores on Google Pay and WhatsApp Business apps, respectively. 

Google’s Spot platform allows small merchants to set up a simple interface for customers for placing orders, and WhatsApp’s Catalog feature allows small sellers to set up a store front to showcase their products. Gupta added that even large players cannot get logistics right. Flipkart, now owned by American retail major Walmart, invested for years and has now built scale and specialisation in e-commerce.

“Of course, as consumer internet continues to grow, there will be very interesting, very different and unique business models that will emerge. Some of them will use social media as a platform or a backbone and some of them will use payment as a backbone. And, some of them will continue to remain what we see today as the mainstream e-commerce. I have no doubt that Flipkart will win in each of those segments. It’s a very speciality-driven and a focus-driven business. It is not something that you can just do as a side. Without focusing on it as your core, you can’t really crack it. Customers need quality and reliability,” added Gupta. 

He was in Delhi to attend a seller-focused event to felicitate about 100 of the best performing sellers in Flipkart’s just-concluded Big Billion Day sale.

Flipkart and Amazon India have come under fire from small traders, led mostly by outfits like the Confederation of Indian Traders and Swadeshi Jagran Manch, for their alleged predatory pricing and the government had said it was looking into these allegations.

Do sellers on Flipkart worry about these issues? “The narrative has been lost somewhere as Flipkart is nothing but tens of thousands of sellers. So, Flipkart is not existing in vacuum. Our sellers are also small businesses, a mix of manufacturers, women entrepreneurs, and all sorts of people coming from all walks of life. From hardworking business persons, who are trying to make their living out of the platform, what I have seen is that our sellers are very resilient. What they believe in is just putting in hard work and getting the huge opportunity that is lying in front of them,” Gupta said.

He added that Flipkart was appreciative of the government’s consultative approach.