After Amazon and Flipkart, Snapdeal emerges as 3rd largest marketplace in traffic

The Indian e-commerce market continues to be dominated by two major marketplaces Amazon and Flipkart. They still command lion shares in terms of shoppers traffic.

According to the latest SimilarWeb report, Amazon got 344 million hits while Flipkart and Myntra combined got 314 million visits in September. While these two players being hailed as largest marketplaces were quite expected, Snapdeal emergence as the next most popular marketplace made for next exciting study case.

Snapdeal, which was on the brink of death in 2017, registered close to 87 million visits to be the third-largest marketplace in the country. From Oct 2017 to Sept 2019, the platform witnessed more than triple growth.

In the last year alone, Snapdeal’s traffic has grown 61% to cross 87 million monthly visits in September 2019 to its web and mobile sites, the report added.

In the last 12 months, Snapdeal saw around 848 million visits, which is 4X of China-based Club Factory.

The recent growth of Snapdeal is largely attributed to its pivot form a high burn game to focus-based value-conscious Bharat market comprising of non-metro towns, where it eyes 400 million potential buyers. The marketplace claims over 90% of its users from the small towns and cities of India.

“ Our ability to build scale along with favourable unit economics gives Snapdeal an immense competitive advantage," said Kunal Bahl, CEO of Snapdeal.

Snapdeal also claimed to register its highest ever number of monthly transacting users in September this year.

During the recent Diwali sale, the company witnessed about 52% growth in sales as compared to the previous year.

Based on its audited financials for FY 2018-19, Snapdeal had reduced its loss by 96% over the last two years. At the same time, its transacting customers grew 2.2X and traffic surged 2.3X to 70 million unique users per month. In the previous two years, Snapdeal has added over 60,000 new seller partners, who have added over 50 Million new listings.

According to the data shared from SimilarWeb, Snapdeal was followed by China’s Club Factory with 29 million, ShopClues at 8.27 million, Tata Cliq at 7.65 million and Paytm Mall at 5.62 million hits.