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E-commerce major Flipkart is using data analytics and algorithm to help the burgeoning number of sellers get better insights into their business during the Big Billion Days’ event during the festival season.
Nishant Gupta, the head of marketplace, business and operations for Flipkart, told BusinessLine, focus will remain on popular categories like lifestyle and mobiles during the Big Billion day sale, but sellers will get better insights into how buyers choose products. “It is entirely data-driven and based on algorithm,” Gupta said.
Called the ‘selection insights’, it helps the seller understand consumer demand as well as allowing them to stock products which are extremely popular at a particular point in time. Every single seller now has a personalised, customised portal to help stock up relevant products, Gupta said.
To attract more sellers, Flipkart has revised its rate card. Rate card informs sellers about various fees to do business on Flipkart.
Rate card cut
These include marketplace fees, commissions and a host of other charges. Fixed fee has been reduced by 50 per cent for a value of less than ₹500. (This is a slab-wise fixed fee for every successful transaction). Similarly, shipping fee and commission fee have been reduced as well.
There has been a 20-50 per cent reduction in key verticals of the home category, 5-15 per cent reduction in clothing and fashion accessories category.
The rate card reduction was made possible by a series of operational and business enhancements that enabled us to pass on the cost benefits to our sellers via the rate card revision, Gupta said.
Growth in sales
He said that during the Big Billion Days, sellers can expect 2.5 to six times business growth.
To accomplish the increased business demand, sellers collectively employ more than 10 lakh employees.
Following the transition to GST last year, transactions have become much smoother for the sellers as well as the e-commerce company “We did a lot of exercises in terms of educating the sellers on how to negotiate the GST regime. We have even offered them personalised services by involving a few agencies,” Gupta said.
He said last year, for the seller community, Flipkart had a wallet share of 70 per cent and Gupta expected that it will only go up during this year as well.
One of the sellers said he expects at least three times growth during the festival season. “Flipkart’s seller programmes like Flipkart Fulfilment and account management have been extremely helpful,” Prakash, CEO, Saran Retail, said.
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