CASE STUDY ON FLIPKART.COM

BY-NIKHIL TRIPATHI(12MCMB10)

TARUN MEHROTRA(12MCMB11)SUDHIR KUMAR PANDEY(12MCMB14)

(M.TECH IT)

INTRODUCTION

Flipkart is an Indian e-commerce company founded by SACHIN BANSAL and BINNY BANSAL in October, 2007. Initially, they focused only on online sales of books but later expanded to other products.

Today as per Alexa traffic ranking, Flipkart is among top 20 Indian websites and has been credited with being India’s largest online book seller with over 11 million titles on offer.

FUNDING Initially self-funded with Rs. 400,000. Later raised two round of funding from Accel India and Tiger Global

Management.

EXPANSION OF FLIPKART• 2010- branched out to selling CDs, DVDs, mobile phones and accessories,

cameras, computers, computer accessories and peripherals

• 2011- pens & stationery, other electronic items such as home appliances, kitchen appliances, personal care gadgets, health care products etc.

• 2012 - added A.C, air coolers, school supplies, office supplies, art supplies & life style products.

• Considered sometimes as amazon of India

LATEST LAUNCHES BY FLIPKART FLYTE- A digital music store : Flipkart’s own digital music

downloads store Flyte now live, an iTunes of India for music. Flipkart now hold the largest collection of music spread across various genres including movie songs, Film/OST, devotional and spiritual, Hindustani, Carnatic, Pop, Rock,  Indipop and others Indian languages. Recently only Flipkart

had acquired Mime360 a Mumbai-based digital content platform company which manages music streaming for popular Indian labels like Saregama, Universal Music and Inreco and also delivers music content to publishers like Gaana, Myusic and iMusti.

Flyte provides DRM (Digital Rights Management) free MP3 files at prices starting from Rs 6 a song and Rs 25 for an album. Users can listen to a 30-second clip before making their purchase. Music purchase from Flyte is currently restricted to users in India only.

Flyte-An online e-book store: Flipkart.com's digital store Flyte has forayed into the eBooks category. To read these eBooks one needs to download the Flyte eBooks app. At present, this app is available only on the Android platform but will be making its way soon to Windows 8. It is not clear by when can one expect this app to be rolled out on other platforms such as iOS and BlackBerry.

The Flyte eBooks store currently has 100,000 books starting from Rs. 30. There are also about 4,000 free titles available to encourage Indian readers.

AFFILIATE Program: The Flipkart affiliate program is a great way for you to earn commissions by placing product banners or links on your website to refer users to the Flipkart.com website. You can earn up to 6% every time a user clicks on the banner/link and makes a purchase on our site.Flipkart.com pays commission to affiliates depending on category of product sold via their website, The referral rates are stated below:

- Books :6%- Mobiles & Accessories : 1%- Computers : 0.5%- Cameras : 2%- Digital :10%- Games & Consoles : 1%- Movies & TV Shows : 4%- Music : 4%- Audio & MP3 Players : 1%- Personal & Health Care : 1%- Home & Kitchen : 1%

- TV & Video : 0.5%- Pens & Diaries : 4%- Watches : 8%- Leather & Travel Accessories : 8%- Health & Beauty : 4%- Toys : 4%- Baby Care : 4%

TECHNOLOGY BEING USED

Client-side Programming Language

JAVASCRIPT: JavaScript is a lightweight, object-oriented, cross-platform scripting language, mainly used within web pages. As a result, their GUI is quite light, efficient and effective. Some of the processing is done on the client-side only which reduces the upload and download bandwidth and server resources as well.

Markup Language

XHTML Strict 1.0: Strict version of XHTML.

Advantages:

- Compatibility: Because XHTML documents are written in compliance with the rules of XML, XML-processing programmes can effortlessly convert an XHTML file to another format (e.g. PDF, RSS or RTF).

- Sustainability: Web applications tend towards XML. Using XHTML now instead of HTML makes any future conversion of the website easier.

Character Encoding

UTF-8: UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode, which is backwards compatible with ASCII.

Advantages:

- there is no advantage to use utf-8 charset but for some languages like Greek, Armenian , Arabic and farsi you have to use utf-8 charset because every character in these languages use 2 byte for store in database and utf-8 is standard charset for multibytes languages.

Site Elements

Gzip Compression: Gzip (GNU zip) is a file compression algorithm. Advantages:

- Decrease Bandwidth Usage & Increase Page Views – When you enable Gzip on your web pages, the compressed files will decrease the average page load size, therefore, decreasing bandwidth usage. This makes it much more convenient for viewers to access and navigate through your website with faster loading pages as well as making the usage of your web server resources more efficient.

-Increase Search Engine Indexing – Enabling Gzip compression allows web spiders to crawl your web pages faster, which means the faster they crawl through your website, the more pages per day they can index.

IPv6: The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) provides amongst others a vastly larger address space than the preceding version 4. We consider a website to support IPv6 if a 128-bit addresses is assigned to it, regardless of the content delivered at that address.

-According to webstatsdomain.com,"Ipv6.flipkart.com is ranked 275 in the world (among the 30 million domains), a low rank means that this website gets lots of visitors.-This site is relatively popular among users in the India.-It gets 96.6% from India.- Ipv6.flipkart.com has 75% seo score.

SSL Certificate Authority

Entrust: Entrust is an IT security service provider, also operating as SSL certificate authority.

Registrar: GoDaddy is the registrar for the domain name http://flipkart.com

Web Server

Nginx 1.2.2: Nginx (pronounced as "engine X") is a lightweight open source web server developed by Igor Sysoev.

Advantages:- Nginx (pronounced “engine x”) is a high performance web server, caching proxy and a Layer 7 load balancing solution. Millions of web sites on the Internet benefit from using Nginx because of its extreme performance, scalability, reliability, flexibility and security. Removes the problem of C10k because it uses event-driven (asynchronous) architecture rather than using threads for serving the clients concurrently.

Some details about the domain

SOME SCREENSHOTS FOR FLIPKART.COM

Details of the SSL certificate of flipkart.com

Details about 2 web servers

Details about DNS servers and IPv6 Address(below)

STRATEGIES Internet web strategy- Flipkart is using Google AD, blogs, social

networking such as FB and twitter, youtube for its expansion. Social media used as feedback mechanism.

Flipkart’s fans on Facebook - 1,112,431. On Twitter-22500 followers

WAREHOUSE LOCATIONS Flipkart is having its warehouses in the cities: Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Noida, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Bhiwandi. Moreover, Flipkart delivers products to 95 cities which includes 2500 pincodes across India.

HIRINGHiring or rather right hiring is one of the critical factors contributing to a

startup’s success, So some of the key criteria that the Flipkart team looks at while hiring are :

• They typically don’t look at specialists to come on board rather they look out for generalists with the attitude to learn and adapt to the fast pace of growth.

• Everyone in the team on a collective and individual level needs to have a high sense of ownership. This is something which clearly differentiates a high performing organization from the others.

• Hiring process is the best brand campaign – Transparency in hiring is one of the best ways to attract the right kind of talent.

• Majority of flipkart are employed in customer support divison.

FLIPKART SUCCESS MANTRA• Great Customer Service.• Easy to use website,hassle free payment system.• Cash on delivery- Almost 60% of sales.• COD created trust in minds of Indian Customer who were always weary of

making payment online.• Focussed on user expierence-Only provide relevant information.• EMI option.• 30 days replacement policy.• Only CSD having 24*7 customer support functioning .• Prepaid wallet feature- Allow shopers to store money onsite and use it to

purchase item, without having to reach for their credit card cash for each transaction.

• Best GUI for digital products- provides comparison methods among the products which most of the sites are lacking.

THREATS

No major threats till now. Challenge- Entry of Amazon.com in India.

COMPARISON Some e-commerce sites like Homeshop18 provide free Shipping across all

products on its website while flipkart provide free shipping on the products having costs more than 300/-.

There are some commercial websites like indiaplaza, landmark, bookadda and infibeam that sells their books at lower price than that of flipkart.

RECOMMENDATIONS

There are some of the points reagarding the improvements in the services and products of FLIPKART.They are as follows:

You can start up city based library services wherein you deliver us the books for a particular period of time.

You can create packages of products for a group of people , preferably for a group of college students or a group of people leaving in the same locality ...that could give you fixed delivery stations.

You can look towards becoming a direct interface between two customers who want to exchange 2nd hand  products

There is no customer loyalty yet. I go for the guys who give me the lowest price for the same product. Since, I know the service levels at all these are comparable, it comes down to cost. That is a hard one to fight as a business.

It should provide services at international levels. Claiming of vendors via a certificate that a particular product has been given

to Flipkart for its selling. Domain of the product delivery should be reachable to remote areas. Less information on footwear and clothing products at the first look. For

e.g.,

(Please see the screenshot below)

In the above example, users can’t find the various sizes of the shoes which are available. They get this information only when they open the detailed information about the product. This results in a little waste of time while surfing for the appropriate products.