With 35% marketshare and $1 Bn in actual sales, Flipkart claims top spot in online fashion

Fashion is a high margin and frequent buying category for retailers. Be it offline or online. Since the fierce battle of retail is being fought in the online arena, fashion is obviously a prime focus for large horizontal e-commerce majors including Flipkart, Amazon and Paytm.

With Myntra and Jabong, Flipkart has the strongest grip on fashion than anyone else.

But the latest number revealed by Flipkart heralds its standalone dominance in the online fashion space. With 35 per cent marketshare, the SoftBank-backed company has claimed to achieve $1 billion actual sales (not GMV) in FY18, reports TOI.

The aforementioned sales figure makes Flipkart, the largest online fashion platform in India. Notably, its affiliate Myntra is projected to close the current financial year with about $900 million in sales. While the sales figure doesn’t give split between branded and private labels.

To beef up its private label part, Flipkart had launched separate in-house labels for women (Divastri) and men (Metronaut). Meanwhile, Myntra private label business has become sizeable. It has achieved Rs 2,000 crore turnover in FY17.

Flipkart has also claimed that 55 per cent of its orders in fashion category hails from non-metro cities. It also expects to cross $1.7 billion in GMV run rate this fiscal.

Currently, Flipkart claims to have over 75-80 per cent market share in overall online fashion segment through its affiliates – Myntra and Jabong. Citing industry sources, the report mentioned that Amazon has about 17 per cent marketshare in the online fashion segment.

The Jeff Bezos-led company has been eyeing quick catch-up in the fashion segment with a mix of branded and private labels. In 2016, Amazon had launched in-house home and kitchen brand Solimo followed by fashion offerings Myx and Symbol.

Despite raising about $500 million, none of the fashion-focused vertical plays (except Myntra) including Fashionandyou, Koovs, Craftsvilla, Zovi, Freecultr, YepMe, Roposo, Voonik and Limeroad has been able to make a visible dent.

Low average basket size, lack of planning and deep-pocketed horizontal e-commerce players have been making difficult for the aforementioned companies to thrive.