Snapdeal may be trying to become India’s Dianping

Snapdeal has changed its business model, yet again. This time by introducing services. It now has segments like flight and bus ticket bookings, hotel reservations and food ordering through partnerships with Zomato, Cleartrip, UrbanClap and RedBus.

At a time when e-commerce majors are struggling with fresh funding and rift with sellers, this all-in-one business model is reminiscent of China’s Dianping, an online portal that offers almost everything from shopping, online reservations, food delivery, and e-coupons, among others.

Dianping is currently one of China’s most popular restaurant-review and group-buying services. Valued at a solid $4.05 billion, this Shanghai-based startup founded in 2003 is a bit of Yelp and Groupon.
Co-founder Zhang Tao launched Dianping in 2003 after he earned his M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Interestingly, Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl is a ​Wharton alumni as well.

Dianping was founded a year after Yelp, which was founded in 2004. Currently, Dianping has over 190 million monthly active users and more than 60 million reviews of restaurants and other local businesses. Its services cover over 12 million local businesses in about 2,300 cities across China.

India has an untapped services industry as well. "Online services is an industry potentially worth $100 billion by 2020 and is poised to play a huge role in driving habit commerce in India. The introduction of services on Snapdeal is a big leap forward in catering to nearly all the consumption needs of our customers," Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal recently said.

"We will continue to add leading service providers from other categories in our journey to offer a single point access to the widest range of services. We are confident that the introduction of services on Snapdeal will bring us closer to our goal of 20 million daily transacting users by 2020," Bansal added.

After acquiring mobile recharge platform FreeCharge back in April 2015 for an estimated $ 500 million, Snapdeal launched recharges and bill payments in March this year. The company claims it has done over a million transactions in a month.

In a recent study by Red Seer Consulting, Snapdeal’s market share fell from 21-23% in 2015. This has allowed other players to grow. While this is sure to boost the online traffic to Snapdeal’s app, it will also allow for more diverse ways of monetization including native advertising.