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February 10, 2016
Richa Maheshwari, The Economic
Times
Bengaluru, 10 February 2016
Snapdeal
has integrated Redbus, Zomato and Cleartrip inventory in its mobile
application as a pilot that will help customers book bus tickets,
flight tickets, hotel tickets and food directly from the application.
This
association gives Cleartrip, Zomato and RedBus access to Snapdeal’s
user base. In return, Snapdeal will earn a commission for each booking
made through its platform. Air ticket is a large gross merchandise
value (GMV) category, while food ordering is a high frequency category.
“Horizontals are looking at monetising their user base with a
focus on GMV and repeat use cases. As funding environment becomes
tougher, growth in these metrics will stand out,” said a Snapdeal
investor requesting anonymity. When contacted, Snapdeal declined
comment.
Last year, CEO Kunal Bahl had told ET that the
company will surpass Flipkart in terms of GMV by March, 2016. “Whatever
their (Flipkart’s) numbers are, we will be ahead of them by March
(2016),” he had said.
Recently, the company tied up with real
estate developers such as TVS Emerald, Provident Housing and Runwal
Group to launch real estate and financial services on its website,
which boosts the company’s GMV. The commission received on such
transactions is not clear. GMV is the overall sales by merchants on an
ecommerce platform, without factoring discounts, out of which an
etailer gets 5-20% as margin on an average. Cleartrip, Zomato and
Redbus refused comment on queries sent by ET.
According
to experts, ecommerce players are now experimenting ways to monetise
traffic through non-inventory based models. “These are service oriented
offerings, which won’t take up any extra cost in terms of physical
space and, hence, these players will make better margin out of it,”
said Devangshu Dutta, CEO at retail consultancy firm Third Eyesight.
Snapdeal
rival, Paytm, is also building a travel marketplace on its platform.
The Alibaba-backed company had started selling hotel and bus tickets on
the platform a few months back. “To provide everything on their
platform, ecommerce players are now encroaching ideas,” said an
investor.
“Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon are going the Paytm
way of launching wallets and two years back, Paytm, a payments company,
started tapping the ecommerce space.”
(Published in The Economic Times)
