Flipkart's Shopsy targets 20X growth ahead of festive season

Bengaluru (IANS) With an eye on the forthcoming festive season, Flipkart's Shopsy on Tuesday announced the launch of a zero-commission marketplace, through which the e-commerce platform will organise and bring smaller sellers across fashion, grocery and home categories, online.

The initiative will spur e-commerce growth across tier-II cities and towns that have been untouched by digital retail so far.

Currently, 70 per cent of Flipkart's customers come from tier II and III cities. With Shopsy, Flipkart aims to scale this to 90 per cent, the company said.

"Our vision with Shopsy is to enable digital commerce for everyone across India. We have received an overwhelming response and are further looking to enable several initiatives on the platform to accelerate growth," said Prakash Sikaria, Senior Vice President - Growth and Monetisation, Flipkart, in a statement.

"Shopsy is growing 100 per cent week on week. The platform is demonstrating the behaviour of a typical social app and virality is starting to kick in. To further expedite this, we aim to bring the best of e-commerce to social commerce as we progress in our journey," Sikaria added.

Flipkart believes gamification along with social commerce features will help it achieve this mission. One such feature is Shop and Earn, where users will be able to unlock higher incentives on achieving a certain weekly/monthly target. This kind of gamification will further lead to virality and evangelisation for fringe e-commerce customers.

Within a month of its launch, Shopsy onboarded more than 2 lakh users. With the onset of the festive season, the platform aims to keep accelerating its growth over the next two months by ramping up features and offerings for Indians who are keen to start their social commerce journey.

Shopsy provides social commerce opportunities for enterprising Indians. Leveraging their local network, Shopsy users are able to share catalogues of a wide selection of 15 crore products offered by Flipkart sellers over social media and communication apps.

Over the last decade, Flipkart has championed several initiatives to unlock value for its customers leveraging tech and innovation, including the low cost logistic network and affordability programmes like 'Flipkart Pay Later'.