Amazon overtakes Flipkart on site visits

While Flipkart saw 23.5 million unique visitors, Snapdeal had 17.9 million in May this year While Flipkart saw 23.5 mn unique visitors, Snapdeal had 17.9 mn in May this year

As e-commerce players battle it out for buyers' attention, Amazon India has caught up with Flipkart and overtaken Snapdeal in terms of monthly unique visitors in May.

According to data from Internet analytics firm comScoreData, Amazon India had 23.6 million unique visitors in May, edging past Flipkart narrowly.

While Flipkart saw 23.5 million unique visitors, Snapdeal had 17.9 million in May this year.

An annual comparison shows that Amazon has seen over a 142 per cent jump in the number of unique visitors since May 2014 while for Flipkart, it's nearly 80 per cent surge. For the same period, Snapdeal saw a 90 per cent rise in unique visitors, the data revealed.

Interestingly, last year in May, Flipkart was leading by a mile, with more than 13 million unique visitors while both Amazon and Snapdeal were in a tight race with close to 10 million unique visitors to their sites.

When contacted, Amazon India declined to comment though it said the repeat rate of customers was "healthy".

Industry experts caution that unique visitors are just another metric for e-commerce companies, and the 'loyalty and stickiness' of customers are a more reliable measure to go by.

"While unique visitors is a metric to show the growing interest in e-commerce, a better metric to speak about a company's performance would be the number of repeat customers an online retailer gets," Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail consultancy Technopak, told PTI.

For a customer, online retail offers price comparison and available options by 'just a click', he said, and the market is still nascent to speak about customer loyalty, which is a significant aspect of offline retail.