Ahmedabad: India’s largest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart today said that it would double its customers base in Gujarat from existing 50 lakhs to around a crore in about a year’s time.

Addressing a press conference here Adarsh Menon, Vice President and Head – Private Labels, Flipkarts said that Gujarat forms one of the biggest and fastest growing markets in Western India for Flipkart, with around 50 lakh customers.
‘We are looking at doubling our customer base here by focusing on enhancing every customer’s shopping experience and by constantly working towards adding new categories, as well as new national and international brands and Gujarat specific products and decreasing the delivery time through our latest exclusive warehouse (for delivery in Gujarat only) in Ahmedabad which was spread over a sprawling 50 thousand square ft. Ideally we would like to double the customer base in Gujarat in a year’s time,’ he said adding that the sellers base in Guajrat which was also around 15% of total 1 lakh across India will also increase substantially as Gujarat was the sole supply center of many of the products.

”While Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot, Jamnagar and Bhavnagar are the top performing cities in Gujarat currently, we would also expand our business in more and more tier two cities like Bharuch, Vapi etc. The customers in Gujarat shop the most for mobiles, apparels and mobile accessories. In addition, women and men’s clothing (mostly branded) are also performing extremely well across cities in this region, and the demand for big screen TVs, laptops and beauty, grooming products are on the rise. The trend shows that students and young working professionals are the most active when it comes to e-shopping, primarily due to the high mobile penetration in this region. Homemakers and working women are also increasingly shopping via the mobile app, especially in Ahmedabad. Interestingly,” he said.

He said that his company which was the first e-marketplace to start in India way back in 2007 in to the 10 th year of existence and has reached a pan India customer base of 10 crore. ‘We have flourished because we are Indian company and know deeply about the needs, aspirations and psyche of Indian customers. Our pan India base is also likely to increase to 25 crore in next four to five years,’ he said.

He said that the company was the inventor of many first in e-commerce business like Cash on Delivery (COD) mode of payment. We have now started a zero interest EMI scheme which was also seeing a great response.

To a query he said that 100% of Flipkart sellers were GST compliant.