While Flipkart leads in fashion and smartphones, Amazon has taken lead in categories such as appliances, consumer electronics, and more importantly, groceries, which builds platform stickiness, said Satish Meena, a senior forecast analyst at Forrester.
Amazon is also emerging as a clear leader among metro consumers, as per a Forrester survey done among 2,000 respondents in 9 cities in 2017, wherein 80% shopped on Amazon, while 65% shopped on Flipkart.
āAfter surpassing Flipkart in 2016 for the first time (in metropolitan user preference), Amazon has strengthened its position as metropolitan Indian consumersā preferred online retail destination and is aggressively closing the gap with Flipkart to become the single-largest online retailer in India in terms of sales,ā a new report by Forrester, titled Online Retail Forecast (2017-2022) Asia Pacific, said.
Overall, the online retail sector saw sales worth $19.6 billion in 2017 ($20.3 billion including movie and event tickets), as per Forrester, which is expected to grow to $27 billion in 2018.
Flipkartās standalone marketshare was 31.9%, while Amazonās was 31.1%, as per the market research firm.
However, Flipkart has vehemently dismissed the report.
āThe findings of this survey are incorrect and do not reflect ground realities. Flipkart is the undisputed leader in Indian ecommerce with 60% overall market share,ā a Flipkart spokesperson said.
āFurther, the so-called survey to find out which online shopping destination Indian consumers prefer has no legs to stand on because it fails miserably on the most important criteria for a survey, which is to have a large-enough, representative sample size. The fact that only 2,000 metro residents were polled, which is 0.002 percent of all online shoppers in Indian metros, shows how irrelevant and skewed the findings are,” the spokesperson added.
Amazon said it has āearned customer trust in less than five years to become the destination of choice for customers all over India to shop for their various needs everyday across hundreds of categories.”
The company also said that 80% of its new customers were coming from tier-II and below geographies.
Flipkart dominates the fashion segment and the smartphone category. Flipkart said this week that it had crossed $1billion in sales in the segment, even beating its own group company Myntra.
In the smartphone segment, Counterpoint Reasearch recently said that Flipkart grew its market share of online smartphone shipments to 51% in 2017, from 44% the year before, while Amazon’s increased marginally to 33% in 2017 from 31%.
However, Amazon is aggressively pushing the grocery segment, seeing sales of $180-$200 million in 2017, as per industry estimates. Online grocery will be a major category in 2018, and Forrester said it expects huge investments in the space, which accounts for 3.8% of total grocery sales in 2017 and will reach 7% by 2022. Forrester, however, did not comment on Walmartās potential investment into Flipkart and how that will help Flipkart push the category.