With the aim of attracting more clicks and increasing sales, Flipkart, a multi brand e-retailer has recently expanded in the women’s apparel segment. In fact Flipkart is a later starter in this space as competitors such as Jabong, Yebhi, Tradus, Myntra, Fashionara, DonebyNone, Zovi among others have already captured market share. 

Flipkart’s expansion strategy is being sighted as a good example of the way Indian ecommerce market is evolving in terms of category adoption from online buyers and how the market is maturing from comparable goods demands online to subjective good demands online. Each category expansion for Flipkart is driven thorough market research and feasibility judgment. 

For horizontal retailers, the idea is to acquire the customer with low ticket size, competitively priced products and make them move up the value chain towards high margins product and high ticket size. In the case of Flipkart, the foundation was laid by book sales, which ‘may be’ at negative margins for now, electronics further helped it in increasing the ticket size per transaction although still at low-to-negative margins. And next was to increase the categories by providing further options and compelling purchases to improve margins, of which apparels, digital goods, and mixing and pushing of private labels are seen as positive examples. 

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