Amazon trumps Flipkart in term of site visits

eCommerce company Amazon India is now ahead of both Flipkart and Snapdeal in terms of monthly unique visitors on their sites. It has registered 23.6 million visitors in May.

While Flipkart witnessed 23.5 million unique visitors, Snapdeal had 17.9 million in the last month, PTI reported, citing the data released by Internet analytics firm comScoreData

Moreover, an annual comparison shows that Amazon has seen over a 142% jump in the number of visitors since May 2014 while for Flipkart, it's nearly 80% surge. In the same period, Snapdeal registered a 90% rise in unique visitors, the data revealed.

Interestingly, last year in May, Flipkart was leading by a mile, with over 13 million unique visitors while both Amazon and Snapdeal were in a tight race with close to 10 million unique visitors on their sites.

Amazon India declined to comment over the development though it said the repeat rate of customers was "healthy".

Industry experts caution that unique visitors are just another metric for e-commerce companies, and the 'loyalty and stickiness' of customers are a more reliable measure to go by.

"While unique visitors is a metric to show the growing interest in e-commerce, a better metric to speak about a company's performance would be the number of repeat customers an online retailer gets," Arvind Singhal, chairman of retail consultancy Technopak, told PTI.

For a customer, online retail offers price comparison and available options by 'just a click', he said, and the market is still nascent to speak about customer loyalty, which is a significant aspect of offline retail.

Another popular parameter e-commerce companies quote is the gross merchandise value (GMV) to indicate the total sales value reflecting the volume of their business, Singhal said.

The country's highest valued e-Commerce company, Flipkart has said it expects its GMV to touch Rs 76,000 crore in a year.

Earlier, the company said it expects to reach a GMV of $8 billion (over Rs 50,000 crore) by December. Snapdeal is also reported to be targeting GMV sales of $10 billion (about Rs 63,000 crore) by the end of calendar year.

While Amazon India does not share details of its sales, it's offering more than 25 million products for sale through its online marketplace.

It reportedly crossed $1 billion (Rs 6,300 crore) in sales in September 2014 while Flipkart reported a GMV of $3 billion for FY15. Snapdeal reportedly crossed the $3.5 billion mark by May.

(Image: Reuters)