Flipkart has big plans for social commerce platform Shopsy

Walmart-owned Flipkart is betting and investing big on Shopsy, its recently-launched platform in India for individuals and small businesses. With this launch, the leading e-commerce player plans to democratize commerce and disrupt the emerging social commerce landscape, backed by its low-cost logistic network and affordability programs such as ‘Flipkart Pay Later’.

Conceived as a social commerce platform, Shopsy has been launched to increase Flipkart’s footprint

Shopsy’s USP

• Conceived as a social commerce platform, Shopsy has been launched to increase Flipkart’s footprint across the breadth of the country by reaching out to a new set of consumers that have been hitherto not well-tapped by digital and e-commerce.

• The launch allows individual entrepreneurs or small business owners to share catalogs of products from Shopsy in their networks and take orders, which in turn will be fulfilled by Shopsy.

Social commerce: the next growth engine

• The platform has announced a zero-commission marketplace for sellers, which will help organize and bring smaller sellers across fashion, grocery and home categories online. This will in turn enable and amplify the supply of products and catalogs on the platform.

• This would help spur e-commerce growth across tier 2 cities and towns that have been relatively late in the digital retail penetration so far. Flipkart hopes that its currently 70% customer base from tier 2 and tier 3 cities could well go up to 90%.

Gamification is the way forward

• Gamification is playing a major role in helping the growth and penetration of social commerce in emerging markets, as well as leading to virality for fringe e-commerce customers.

• Flipkart, for instance, has launched ‘shop & earn’, which would let users unlock higher incentives on achieving a certain weekly/monthly target.

Expert speaks

• There is clearly a huge appetite among consumers for social commerce, especially in a post-pandemic world. Within a month of its launch, Shopsy claims to have onboarded more than 2 lakh users, which it hopes will see a further spike on the back of the upcoming festive season in India.

• Flipkart’s senior vice-president – growth and monetization, Prakash Sikaria, said: “The Flipkart Group has been committed to constantly expanding the scope of e-commerce; and Shopsy is an important step in that direction.” Our vision with Shopsy is to enable digital commerce for everyone across India, he added.

• Shopsy is growing 100% week-on-week and is demonstrating the behavior of a typical social app with virality also having kicked in, he said.