Flipkart vs Amazon: Why Flipkart Failed?

Basic Information about Flipkart:

Flipkart is one of the most famous online shopping companies in India after Amazon. Flipkart was founded in October 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, although they have the same last name, they aren't related to each other.

Almost 77% of the controlling stake is owned by Walmart. Between 2013 and 2014, Flipkart has grown 5x in volume terms. The company further reported that its net loss increased 86% to Rs 3,835 crore during 2019.

Reasons behind why Flipkart losses eventually:

1.  Flipkart refuse to give service to tier-2 cities (towns) and below when Amazon was sleeping:

This was the worst mistake done by Flipkart or else it could easily cope up with the current situation faced by them. 

When Amazon didn't come to India, Flipkart used to give services to the people living in metropolitan cities and refused to give service to tier-2 cities and below. At that time, 80-85% of the Indian population live outside the metro cities.

Moreover, people living in urban areas could easily get access to products nearby while people living in rural places didn't have many shops nearby and were attracted to Flipkart, but Flipkart just refused them.

And the situation became bad for Flipkart when Amazon came to India because Amazon settled mostly in rural areas and gain their supports. Flipkart was not aware that establishing up in rural areas will help them to get more profits,

Flipkart started to give service to rural areas much later than Amazon did and at the same time, Amazon gained more popularity in rural areas. Due to this, Flipkart couldn't control its reign.

2.  Poor customer care policy: 

Flipkart didn't give much attention to customer care policy, the reason why Amazon is above Flipkart in terms of a better e-commerce site is since Amazon gives customer satisfaction the top priority. 

According to an answer in Quora on the review of Flipkart:

Some agents were rude and don't know how to talk with customers.

My experience once with Amazon: I ordered a product of 100 grams from Amazon. It did arrive pretty fast, but the product was 50 grams. I lodged a complaint to the agent of Amazon for the rest of 50 grams. A very unexpected thing happened.
The agent refunded the whole money worthing that of 100 grams without even asking return. 

Amazon is rich, we all know, but Flipkart is not any poor company and 300rs-600rs is nothing for a billion-dollar company, though Flipkart still don't refund like  Amazon-style i.e refund without return

3. Flipkart's delivery sucks:

Flipkart, most of the time delivers their products after the presumed time limit, which is pretty annoying for the consumers. 

              Snap from a Flipkart's customer

Though sometimes, Flipkart delivers their product much before the estimated time though in most of the cases, they failed to deliver it on time.

On the other hand, Amazon, most of the time, never failed to deliver their products by the estimated delivery time, even before it. Which contributes significantly to customer satisfaction.

4. Discount and offers policy:

Flipkart failed miserably because their discounts were rather too small for the Indian consumers and they found their way toward Amazon where they offered amazing discounts.

The left one is from Flipkart with 64 Gb and the right one from Amazon with 256 GB. The ironic fact is that Flipkart one is costlier.

It is true that if Flipkart relied much on increasing the discounts over their products, this problem wouldn't have lightened up because more consumers would have depended on Flipkart, and at the same time, Flipkart cannot bear losses caused by increased discounts.

5. Flipkart lacks innovation:

Their UI system in Flipkart is not user-friendly. The search algorithm is not good enough to satisfy users. When we type any specific product in the search bar, sometimes the wrong product appeared below. Whereas Amazon is pretty good in this term

Amazon has launched several kinds of stuff to advertise on large scale such as Amazon Prime to watch videos and songs, whereas Flipkart lack behind in this term.

6. Many consumers have reported getting fake products from Flipkart. 

This is also in the case of Amazon because products do not get verified or checked by Flipkart or Amazon. Refund is surely a safe side for it, but those fake products can literally run more than the limited time of refund.

7. Flipkart brought a domain named 'Amazo dot in' to gain get more people. 

Though I would say it's not wrong to do this. Flipkart wanted to push higher by doing this tactic. As 'amazon dot in' is one of the most popular domains in India, so definitely some or many people may misspell it and by this way, the chance become higher that the user ends up landing on Flipkart. Though I know that users aren't dumb and they may switch to Amazon, but at the same time the traffic to Flipkart rises, which leads to a better site ranking. 

It's not a bad thing as many people claim it. Flipkart simply lacks consumers, no option left for Flipkart other than using some 'cheat-tactic' like this one. People shouldn't create a controversial statement on this because we certainly do not want this business to die because of a lack of consumers. It is also said that sellers face some kind of issue. Flipkart may not survive. 

          -----------------

Since you are here, do visit : 6 Reasons Why Apple sucks