Flipkart Plans To Drive Growth In Grocery, Travel Segment

Ecommerce giant Flipkart is planning to give a strong push to its groceries segment. The Walmart-backed ecommerce company sees considerable green shoots in the under-penetrated segment where it can add value to customers.

Flipkart Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kalyan Krishnamurthy said groceries is a less penetrated segment for ecommerce although it is an everyday staple for the masses. The ecommerce company is looking at driving growth in this area, Krishnamurthy added as reported by The Hindu BusinessLine.

“We are doing well in the grocery. That is the segment we want to work in and add value for the customers, as 99% of India is value-conscious. We think we can deliver value and selection along with speed while being operationally effective,” Krishnamurthy said.

He also noted that Flipkart is the second largest player in grocery.

Last year, Flipkart announced the expansion of its grocery services to 1,800 cities across India. “The e-grocery market continues to see increased demand as consumers from tier 2 and 3 markets will get access to high quality selection of staples and household items from reputed brands at great value,” Flipkart Grocery vice president, Smrithi Ravichandran, said at the time of the announcement.

However, Flipkart scaled down its quick-commerce service ‘Flipkart Quick’ in the later part of 2022 and consolidated the business with its next-day grocery delivery platform ‘Flipkart Supermart’ as the Walmart-owned company was bullish on the grocery vertical.

In the quick commerce grocery space, players such as Dunzo, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart are leading the segment. On the other hand, Flipkart rival Amazon too sees huge opportunity for its grocery service in India and plans to continue expansion of this segment. In November 2021, Amazon integrated its grocery stores Fresh and Pantry into a single unified store called Amazon Fresh. The service was available across 300+ Indian cities as of July, 2022.

Reliance’s JioMart, on the other hand, recently stopped its quick grocery service delivery of the JioMart Express as it did not want to burn cash heavily. Hence, JioMart now delivers groceries in a few hours of the day

The Indian online grocery market was pegged at $3.95 Bn in 2021 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 33.00% to reach $26.63 Bn by 2027, according to a report by Research And Markets.

The next segment for Flipkart after grocery is travel. The company also plans to expand in the travel space where it onboarded 400 Mn users over the past 12 months. Thanks to the digital-led nature of travel and ticketing, travel leaves scope for market opportunity, according to the Flipkart CEO.

Last year, the ecommerce major launched its hotel booking service called Flipkart Hotels. It also planned to start services such as EMI options for Flipkart Hotels users to shore up bookings.