Flipkart is betting on live and video commerce to increase its conversion rate and reach the next billion users. The company plans to broadcast live trade videos around the clock during its 7-day end-of-season sale.
Live trading was launched on Flipkart in February 2022 in the form of Flipkart Feed. This new form of commerce involves influencers showcasing various fashion products in a live video, and customers can buy these products directly on Flipkart. Activity area spoke to Sandeep Karwa, Vice President of Flipkart Fashion, about the company’s plan for live commerce and the growth of vertical fashion. Excerpts:
Why did you decide to trade live/video 24 hours a day? Have you seen a high conversion rate on Flipkart Feed?
Conversion rates on live commerce are lower than our static web page conversion, but they are a very encouraging number. I say that’s an encouraging number because it allows us to talk to very different types of customers. This will allow us to engage with a client who is probably not very comfortable with using a static web page. This is also why we started our work on vernacular languages; today, our application is accessible in many vernacular languages. Live commerce allows us to bring people from different age groups, geographies, and backgrounds into the realm of e-commerce. I think that’s where the real encouragement lies.
Can you share engagement metrics from live sessions hosted on Flipkart Feed in the past?
Today, Flipkart streams also have static posts and lots of content from stream partners. We saw healthy engagement on the stream. A live trading video lasts 10-30 minutes, and we’ve seen that 60-70% of users who started watching a video stayed to watch the entire video. It is also too early to talk about other engagement measures.
Do you see live commerce increasing Flipkart’s conversion rate and revenue in the future?
Yes definitely. Live and video commerce engages a completely different type of customer. Second, it also encourages a customer to buy not just one product, but the whole look. This expands the customer’s basket with us and probably also increases our share of wallet with that customer. Live trading is therefore a very important bet for us. Moreover, Live also converts many latent customer needs into real needs.
Who is Flipkart Fashion’s current clientele?
Most of our customers are from outside the metro and Tier 1 cities. When I say most, over 50% are from Tiers 2, 3, and 4. This includes small villages with a population of 10,000 to 20,000 people. This is where the bulk of Flipkart customers come from. But then almost around 45% of customers come from metro and level 1. It becomes complex for Flipkart to go out and talk to this kind of diverse customer base. We deliver to customers in over 19,000 postcodes. In terms of gender, we are roughly 50-50 and speak to both women and men.
What are your expectations for the upcoming end of season sale?
In the spring-summer season that just ended, we were able to ship approximately 200 million fashion products this year, which is an unprecedented number for the industry. So we are still in that zone and expect that momentum to continue in the end of season sale.
To give you more context, we saw about 70% more sellers participating in the Spring/Summer season this year compared to last year. When I say participation, these are sellers who have obtained a significant sale. There were around 175,000 sellers on the platform this year, and we had items ranging from ₹150 to ₹10,000 across all categories. For the end of season sale, we plan to do 24 hours of live/video trading over the seven days of the sale, which has never happened in India before.
Published on
June 06, 2022