Snapdeal, one among the fastest growing Indian online marketplaces, is now going to invest more in the logistics to cut down the delivery times of the orders, in order to take on India’s biggest marketplaces – Flipkart and Amazon.
With more than $500 million raised in a recent funding round from Alibaba, SoftBank and Foxconn, the company is now looking forward to invest that money in expanding and improving its core logistics services.
Realizing the increase in online shopping due to competitive rates and wide range of selection, the order delivery time has not yet improved as required, in India. Thus, Snapdeal will now focus on reducing delivery time by investing in data analytics and predictions, co-founder Rohit Bansal earlier told Reuters.
In last 12 months, Snapdeal has made around 10 acquisitions and investments in startups, all in the field of technology or supply chain management and payments. With this, the company claims to have improved service by 70 percent.
Quicker delivery of orders is one of the way to win over customers in this highly competitive market. Snapdeal has also acquired 50 percent stake in delivery service provider GoJavas for around $35 million.
To have an advantage over Flipkart and Amazon, Snapdeal is planning to offer its services to its customers in 11 new Indian languages and plans to target 130 million more users which have been left out because of that English disconnect.
Earlier, Snapdeal bought online recharge company FreeCharge in April for around $400 million. Recently, FreeCharge launched its mobile wallet service named FreeCharge Wallet which got over 1 million subscribers within a week of its launch.
A couple of months ago, we reported that Snapdeal is planning to raise around $300 million funding round for the growth of FreeCharge while Snapdeal had already announced to invest Rs. 1000 crore in marketing and promoting its digital services, including Freecharge.
Commenting about the company’s view ahead, Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal, said,
Our view is that in five years from today 10% of India’s consumption will happen online, not just products, but all consumption, and we want to build a technology ecosystem for that.
The company was founded in 2010 by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal. It has raised $1.54 billion in around 10 funding rounds from 19 investors. It is backed by Alibaba, Foxconn, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital, SoftBank, Ratan Tata, among others.
According to a report, the e-commerce market in India is expected to grow to $220 billion by 2025, up from an expected $11 billion this year. Snapdeal had $4.5 billion in Gross Merchandise Volumes (GMV).
