While everyone talks about Amazon and Flipkart, a third player, Snapdeal is silently going about its ecommerce business on its own strength. The company was at crossroads two years ago and it was assumed that the company will be sold of will fold up. The founders then decided to rework their business strategy and plough on. They called it Snapdeal 2.0. Kunal Bahl, CEO and Co-founder of Snapdeal has now put out a detailed post on his LinkedIn page sharing the journey of the company so far.
The first point the Snapdeal CEO has touched upon is the company’s performance in revenue terms. The company has officially released the audited results of the company in the public domain. According to this, the financial year 2018-19 has seen a turnover of Rs 925 crore, a 73% increase over the previous year’s Rs 536 crore and more importantly, the losses have reportedly been drastically cut down by 70% from Rs 611 crore to Rs 186 crore. Kunal claims in his post that Snapdeal was the first ecommerce company in the country to have achieved a cash-profit milestone in June 2018. He has also claimed that it is the only startup that has achieved higher revenues while bringing down the losses.
Kunal says their focus was on tapping the potential lying with the 400 million internet users who form the lower tier out of the universe of 500 million active internet users in India. These users may be typically from the cities and towns of India that get categorized as tier 2 and tier 3.
Snapdeal 2.0 then identified a few key strategies to win over these 400 million. These included getting closer to the customers, deeper collaboration with their seller-partners, putting the fun into shopping, staying lean and moving fast and so on. Using technology and keeping the employee morale high were the other aspects of this strategy.
Kunal has then gone on to explain each of these aspects to share with everyone how these were worked on and how the company has gained through these approaches in each of the areas.
Customers are being invited to their office to share their opinions. The sellers have been encouraged to reach 200 million listings on the platform and there have been over 60,000 new sellers added during this Snapdeal 2.0 period. The CEO has not forgotten to take a dig at the giant rivals of Snapdeal, Amazon and Flipkart by claiming that not a single seller on their platform is a related or proxy seller. They are all independent. According to him the sellers have doubled their turnover in one year.
Kunal Bahl has signed off his long blog on LinkedIn covering some of the corporate governance issues like valuation and size of the board etc. These are more addressed to fellow promoters of tech startups in the country than the public at large.
He has said Snapdeal will march on in the coming years with the same zeal and enthusiasm they displayed in the last two years.