Amazon emerges e-commerce leader in October
27 Nov 2015
As e-commerce players battled for consumer attention during the festive period, Amazon India saw maximum visitors on its web and mobile sites in October, at over 200 million visitors, as per recent data from internet analytics firm comScore.
In comparison, home-grown rival Flipkart saw 164 million visitors to its web and mobile sites combined, while Snapdeal saw 109 million visitors in the month.
An annual comparison shows that Amazon has also seen the most rapid growth in one year between November 2014 and October 2015.
Amazon India saw a wide arc in its growth from 85 million visitors last year to over 200 million this year.
Flipkart, which was leading the pack last year with 140 million visitors in October 2014, stood at about 163 million visitors in October 2015, the data shows.
Snapdeal saw a marginal growth from about 90 million visitors to about 110 million visitors in the one year period.
Interestingly, even as more than 70 per cent of sales for Amazon reportedly take place through the mobile application, the company saw more than 30 million unique monthly visitors on the desktop site in October.
This is higher than other comparable ecommerce players, including Flipkart which saw 26.9 million unique desktop visitors, comScore numbers revealed.
The data corroborates Amazon's sales numbers that show its India business has quadrupled in the last year.
The number of sellers on the platform has also grown by over 250 per cent, the company had reported last month.
Amazon India, which now has over 21 fulfilment centres in the country, has tripled its capacity in the last year alone with a cumulative storage capacity of five million cubic feet.
Last year, the online retail giant had announced an investment of $2 billion to expand its operations in India and is committed to pump further investments in the country, which is a key market.
Amazon, which competes with Flipkart and Snapdeal among others in India, operates under a marketplace model here as regulations in the country do not allow foreign capital in business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce.
The ecommerce industry in India is expected to touch $60-70 billion by 2019 from $17 billion in 2014.