While the e-commerce ecosystem in India is dominated by Flipkart and Amazon, Snapdeal is now also gearing up to join the unicorns at the pole position. To be able to execute this surmountable feat, the Indian e-commerce giant is reported to have introduced a handful of management changes — handing out new roles to key executives and bundling up multiple categories into one. The transition is expected to be completed within the coming week.
In an internal memo sent to its employees, co-founder Rohit Bansal has dubbed these changes as ‘imperative,’ reports TOI. This will most likely enable Snapdeal to achieve operational efficiency and better business results in the long run. This restructuring process comes on the heels of the recent rebranding, and a box-shaped logo with the tagline of ‘Unbox Zindagi.’
It is also on the heels of the recent festive season sales, which saw Flipkart emerge as the victor followed closely by its arch-enemy Amazon. Snapdeal still lagged behind these two in terms of sales and this might have instigated the company to introduce changes that’ll help unify verticals and better manage them with a singular outlook.
Taking a detailed look at the reorganization, the memo first mentions one of the biggest transformation. It states that the market development, category management and parts of the brand alliance teams will be coming together under the leadership of Vishal Chadha, who is SVP of business at Snapdeal. The multitude of departments that’ll now report directly to Chadha include mobile & tablets, fashion, electronics, FMCG, used refurbished goods, central merchandising, central go-to-market, seller services, business development and seller ads, central pricing and analytics.
With Vishal’s team, we will move to a business unit structure where all category managers, key account managers, brand partnership managers and most other functions pertaining to a category will become a part of the same business unit,
says Bansal in the statement.
In addition, Snapdeal is also said to be handing out new roles in this organisational change. Saurabh Bansal, vice president and head of category management will now be looking after Snapdeal Instant, the company’s service aimed at making delivery faster. Once could call this synonymous to Amazon’s Prime service which has recently been introduced by the American e-commerce giant in India. The pricing analytics team will now report to Anubhav Goyal while Tony Navin has been assigned to head the partnerships & strategic initiatives of the company.
Snapdeal’s share in the e-commerce pie of the country has been debilitating in the past year as it has been losing massive market share to its rivals Flipkart and Amazon, who’s grown to be recognized at the top in just three years. Snapdeal is now also focusing on other services, such as Wallet on Delivery(launched yesterday) and Snapdeal Cirrus – an OpenStack cloud platform to expand beyond its roots. This is also a step closer to Amazon and will enable it to attract more customers for its platform. SoftBanl has recently also written off an investment in the company in its quarterly financial results.
We’ve contacted Snapdeal to confirm the reorganization and will update you once we receive a reply from them.
