The India eCommerce market is going through a lot of growth.
A largely untapped market due to the lack of infrastructure – logistics, electronic payments, shipping and cultural opposition to eCommerce has seen a huge uptick in acceptance and sales over the past few years.
The large eCommerce players all publish various statistics on who is Number 1 in India such as this recent article in the Economic Times in India.
We decide to look at how many products are actually available for sale on each of these marketplaces and here is what we found
- Flipkart sells 41,026,168 products
- Amazon India sells 61,242,425 products
- SnapDeal didn’t allow us to see the total number of products
By this simple comparison, seems like Amazon is Number 1 based on the number of products available for sale.
If you look a little closer though Amazon India sells 23.7 million books out of the 61.2 million products (38.5% – a huge percentage) while Flipkart sells only 4.3 million books (10% – a more reasonable percentage).
We all know that Amazon US started as an online bookstore, but the Amazon India store probably did not. It is surprising to see the lead Amazon has over Flipkart is largely based on Books.
The rest of the major categories don’t seem to have a head to head comparison between the two sites. e.g Flipkart has a “Mobile and Accessories” categories with 25 million products but Amazon doesn’t have that exact category. Instead Amazon has the Electronics category which has 28 million products for sale.
Here is a graphic from ET India about market share from March/April 2016.
