“Fashion business is the engine of growth for Flipkart”

The fashion e-commerce segment was pegged at about $4.8 billion in India in 2020, and this grew to about $9 billion in 2021“

The ‘fashion business’ is the engine of growth for Flipkart, driving nearly 45-50% of the new customers to the e-commerce giant, according to a senior company official.

“Fashion is the most interesting part of flipkart because it is like the engine of the company. The reason we call it an engine is because this is where our customers first transact with us,” Sandeep Karwa, Vice President - Flipkart Fashion, told The Hindu.

Mr. Karwa added that fashion as a business is driving about 45-50% of customers to Flipkart, up from 30-35% a couple of years back. “So if in the month, we will acquire say 100 customers, 45-50 of those customers are going to transact for their first time in fashion…and this is true for the overall e-commerce industry as well”.

From a price-point perspective, fashion is an entry-level purchase, and hence, people are okay making their first e-commerce transaction in this category.

“This is the most important business for the company. This is also one business where potential is still the largest. I can definitely tell you that as a business, we [fashion] are definitely growing faster than the platform and we are happy about that because what we do here actually is going to come back and help every other business on the platform,” Mr. Karaw added.

During the Spring-Summer season 2022, the Walmart-owned ecommerce firm recorded sales of over 200 million fashion products across close to 19,200 pin codes, and saw participation from close to 175,000 fashion sellers. Customers shopped for products from across the country, including from cities like Ranchi, Ernakulam, Kanpur, Medinipur and Cuttack.

Mr Karwa added that following the pandemic, not only did consumers move from offline to online for their shopping needs, but were shopping for completely different categories. For example, while some of the traditional categories witnessed slowdown, new categories such as athleisure, track pants, shorts and the entire verticals of innerwear saw a ‘massive explosion’.