The goal of launching Shopsy Flipkart, a new social commerce platform owned by Walmart, was to appeal to consumers in Tier II cities and beyond. Social media users can use the app to resell items from the online marketplace and gain a modest commission.
What Does Flipkart Hope to Gain from Shopsy’s Debut?
The e-commerce platform wants to make Shopsy online shopping more commonplace among the nation’s expanding online population.
By 2025, India is expected to have 900 million active internet users as rural areas see increased use. People use the internet for roughly three hours daily, primarily for chatting, social media networking, and video streaming. These individuals hardly ever shop online due to a lack of confidence and technological difficulty.
Such hesitation is common not only in rural areas but also among middle-aged and older people in metropolises and cities who are only technologically literate enough to use Facebook and WhatsApp.
How Does the Shopsy Flipkart App Function?
The Shopsy app enables users to sign up for accounts and transmit Flipkart product catalogue to prospective buyers using messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Once the clients have made up their minds about what they want to buy, the Shopsy user can place the orders on their behalf and, depending on the product category and ticket amount, receive commissions that might vary from Rs 5 to Rs 25, or possibly more.
What Possibilities Exist?
Over 150 million products from 350,000 merchants are currently available on Flipkart’s site. By 2023, Flipkart hopes to help 25 million online business owners benefit from digital commerce with Shopsy.
This is quite similar to influencer marketing. While an influencer’s role is to promote a product, these resellers will also be in charge of completing transactions by collecting client payments.
Although the commissions seem low, the resellers’ success and entrepreneurship will determine how much money they can make.
Shopify vs Shopsy
Flipkart has already experimented with the social commerce approach to increase its market penetration. It established 2GudSocial last year so social media influencers could assist users in making online purchases through engaging video shopping experiences.
A media source claims that the company intends to assist resellers with storefronts resembling Shopify’s. Flipkart, however, declined to confirm this.
The business model of Shopify in Canada is considerably dissimilar from what Shopsy currently provides. Shopify develops digital storefronts for vendors who share these links with prospective buyers using social networking apps, in contrast to Shopsy, which permits independent resellers to distribute product catalogues to customers.
Final Words
While a small number of huge corporations have dominated India’s e-commerce market so far, social commerce is opening the way for a more distributed model based on connection, community, and trust. After proposed standards for e-commerce enterprises that prohibit them from displaying linked parties as vendors on their marketplaces, Shopsy Flipkart was finally launched.
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