Flipkart – A new option for Online shopping

Most of you would have seen a television commercial where a mouse keeps running inside a wheel. So you guys must be familiar with the name FLIPKART if you have watched the advert. If not, let me tell you what Flipkart is.

Flipkart is an Indian electronic commerce company headquartered in Bangalore, India. It is the largest online bookstore in India.Flipkart was established in October 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. Both are alumni of Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and worked forAmazon.com before quitting and founding their own company. Initially they used word of mouth marketing and social networking websites to popularise their company. Flipkart broke even in March 2008 and claims to have had at least 100% growth every quarter since its founding. The store started with selling books and in 2010 branched out to selling CDs, DVDs, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets. During financial year 2009-10, it reported a sales of  20 Crores (200 million). Initially funded by the Bansals themselves, Flipkart has since then raised two rounds of funding from venture capital funds Accel India (2009) and Tiger Global Management (2010). The company has 1000 employees.

[Source: Wikipedia]

So I decided to try out the services provided by Flipkart. To start with I tried to go through all the categories in detail and check the variety they are offering. And to my surprise, they have a huge collection of everything, be it books or music or even games. The interface is pretty well laid out and its quite easy to navigate through the menus. Also when you enter your required menu there is a plethora of categories. This helps a naive user to get what he wants in a very short time.

Then as my interest grew, I decided to order something. And since I love novels, I jumped directly to the Novels section. The options and the categories blew me off ! The collection is huge and books are arranged in categories perfectly. The next step is that I decided to search for a book (which is quite obvious). So I searched for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson. I knew it would cost me around   350 if I but it from any Crossword shop (Not considering any discount because they don’t give any in my city). SO anything less than that would have been a great bargain for me and it turned out to be more than that. The price at which they were offering the book was   210 which makes it 40% less than the MRP. Now that’s quite a lot of discount given the fact that its an e-Commerce website that allows Cash-On-Delivery.

Yes you read it right, Flipkart allows Cash-On-Delivery unlike eBay and Amazon, thus making it a very safe option (Although eBay and Amazon are safe but still using credit card for online transactions is still a risk). Another advantage of Cash-On-Delivery is that people who don’t have a credit card mostly teenagers can order for books, music, games etc and not worry about convincing their parents for swiping their credit cards.

Another good thing about Flipkart is that it gives a perfect estimate of the Delivery time of the ordered item. Also most of the items have a estimated delivery time of 2-3 business days which is quite less amount of time to be frank.

Shipment is FREE. Yes, it is FREE for orders above  100. Flipkart delivers packages above  100 for free thus making it a very lucrative option for large orders.

Once ordered, You get a mail notifying the order details and a Reference ID of the order. Later once the shipment is shipped, another mail is sent containing a Shipping ID through which you can track your order. Thus chances of your package getting lost are pretty slim.

The only disadvantage with Flipkart is that it does not allow you to sell your own stuff. But for that you have eBay. I don’t consider it as a big disadvantage though.

Thus, what I feel about Flipkart is that it is an Indian answer to eBay and Amazon but it might not threaten their throne for at least a while. But since I got excellent service, I would always prefer it. Try it guys, it’s a great option for e-Commerce.