The war between Flipkart and Amazon is becoming more cut-throat with Amazon India pipping homegrown Flipkart and emerging as the most downloaded retail mobile app in India on Google Playstore and Apple’s App Store in the first quarter of 2016.
According to San Francisco-based app intelligence firm App Annie survey, Amazon.in’s app has overtaken Flipkart to emerge as the most downloaded in India. Delhi-based, Snapdeal bagged the number three slot.
As per data by App Annie, Amazon got 1.92 million downloads in May, while Flipkart had 1.72 million. The company has taken this lead since March. Another web and app analytics firm, SimilarWeb, too, rated Amazon ahead of Flipkart in app downloads after getting in data for the past 28 days.
It is worthy to note that Amazon began India operations just three years ago, while Flipkart started operations way back in 2007, albeit only as a book e-tailer then. In December last year, ComScore also ranked Amazon as the largest online store in India in 2015, adding over 55,000 new products to its inventory per day.
The US e-commerce giant also overtook Flipkart on the web. SimilarWeb on Tuesday listed Amazon India at the 128th position among the top 300 websites globally, while Flipkart stood at 223, the report added.
However, Flipkart continues to be ahead of Amazon India in terms of monthly active use of the app. While 4.5 per cent of Flipkart users browse the app every day, only 2.7 per cent of Amazon users do so. Consumers also spend more time on the Flipkart app (8.25 minutes per session) than on Amazon (6.2 minutes).
“While Flipkart has reduced its sale events and advertisements on media, Amazon continues to spend money on media and naturally tends to get more people to download the app. The Amazon app quality is also better since it is a global technology platform. Indications are that Amazon might be very close to Flipkart or already ahead in sales,” Partner at audit firm Grant Thornton, Harish HV, was quoted as saying by TOI.
In fact, with Amazon’s Chief executive officer Jeff Bezos pledging to invest another $3 billion in his company’s India operations, the gap between Amazon and Flipkart is already narrowing.
Interestingly, the situation was different last year, when the Flipkart app had 41.5 million downloads on Android devices till October 2015, while Amazon had only 20.15 million, according to data from App Annie. In December 2014, the difference between Flipkart and Amazon in terms of average daily downloads was around 50,000.
Here’s a look at the top 10 retail apps, in terms of downloads, as per the App Annie report:
1Amazon
Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States and world by total sales and market capitalization. The company started as an online bookstore, later diversifying to sell DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, video downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys and jewelry. It launched Amazon.in in 2013.
Read: Amazon India was India’s biggest e-tailer in 2015
Read: Amazon increases India investments to $5 billion
2Flipkart
Flipkart was founded in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. Bansal’s(not related) worked for Amazon.com, and left to create their new company incorporated in October 2007 as Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd.The first product they sold was the book Leaving Microsoft To Change The World to a customer from Hyderabad and has grown to become one of the largest online marketplaces in India. It’s last fundraising round in May 2015 had pegged its valuation at $15 billion.While in May 2016, Morgan Stanley lowered Flipkart’s valuation at $9.39 billion.
3Snapdeal
Based in New Delhi, the company was started by Kunal Bahl, a Wharton graduate as part of the dual degree M&T Engineering and Business program at Penn, and Rohit Bansal, an alumnus of IIT Delhi in February 2010. Started on 4 February 2010 as a daily deals platform, but expanded in September 2011.Offering an assortment of 10 million products across diverse categories from over 100,000 sellers, shipping to more than 5,000 towns and cities in India.
4Paytm
Launched in 2010 and owned by One97 Communications, Paytm started as a mobile wallet company offering mobile recharge, paying bills, among others. It went on to become an e-commerce platform in 2015 with products similar to businesses such as Flipkart, Amazon.com, Snapdeal. In 2015, it further added booking bus travel.The company has recently launched movie ticket booking by partnering with Cinépolis in the year 2016.
5Myntra
Myntra is an Indian e-commerce company of fashion and casual lifestyle products, headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. The company was founded in 2007 by Indian Institute of Technology graduates with a focus on personalisation of gift items. By 2010, Myntra shifted its focus to the online retailing of branded apparel. In May 2014, Myntra.com merged with Flipkart to compete against Amazon and other established offline retailers like Future Group, Aditya Birla Group and Reliance Retail.
6Voonik
Voonik is a fashion marketplace for women, with a focus on personalisation. The Voonik app was envisioned to be every woman’s personal stylist. The app handpicks the best clothes for users based on their body type, skin tone, budget and style preferences. It provides instant recommendations from stylists on the kind of clothes that will suit the user, how to wear them, and what to pair them with. It brings the convenience of shopping from multiple stores on one single cart; over 15,00,000 products from more than 3500 stores including top online stores and 5000 brands are made available to discerning users interested in shopping for fashion that makes them look good.
7ShopClues
ShopClues is an online marketplace with more than 100 million monthly visitors on its website and was founded in July 2011 in Silicon Valley by Sandeep Aggarwal. ShopClues ships in over 25k cities across India and has thousands of online stores. The company is run by co-founders Sanjay Sethi & Radhika Aggarwal and an energetic team of over 1000 + people and is funded by leading institutional investors, is an Indian subsidiary of Clues Network Inc., a US Corporation and is based out of Gurgaon.
8Jabong
Backed by the Samwer Brothers company, Rocket Internet, Jabong was launched in 2012. It was co-founded by Arun Chandra Mohan, Praveen Sinha, Lakshmi Potluri. All co-founders have left the company. In March 2013, Jabong was shipping 6000-7000 orders a day.It clocked gross sales of around US $100–150 mn in 2012.
As per a Livemint report, during September 2013 Jabong was shipping 14,000 orders on a daily basis out of which 60% were from small towns. It was one of the most visited e-commerce sites during the Great Online Shopping Festival 2013 and claimed that its revenues increased five to six times compared to a usual day.In December 2015, Jabong announced Sanjeev Mohanty as its new CEO.
9LimeRoad
Launched in July 2012 by Suchi Mukherjee, Prashant Malik and Ankush Mehra, Limeroad has now become a social discovery platform for customers to shop for fashion and lifestyle products. On 25 September 2012, the website went live with the Limeroad Shopping app across smartphone platforms. Earlier serving as a fashion and lifestyle website for women, the portal has now extended its catalogue to the lifestyle and fashion needs of men with the launch of its Men’s Wear on 23 May 2016.
10Wish by ContextLogi
ContextLogic Inc., doing business as Wish, provides online services that include media sharing and communication tools, personalized and other content, and e-commerce. The company was founded in 2010 and is based in San Francisco, California.
