Indian e-commerce giant will rebrand the appliances category as Big Home Appliances and expand warehouses for high-priced products and domestic machine to meet the high demand during festive seasons like Diwali.
Flipkart is also looking to revive the operation and supply chain for large appliances by including more offerings from top selling brands such as VU and Samsung and level up the effort by ensuring faster delivery and quick product installation. The effort is expected to double up sales in the particular category this year, reported Mint.
"People were not considering us when it came to purchase decisions about large appliances. So, we decided to rebrand it," said Sandeep Karwa, head of appliances in Flipkart.
Meanwhile, Amazon India is also coming up with aggressive strategies to compete in the similar category; however, Flipkart still remains the market leader in selling appliances online.
Flipkart expects, appliances such as televisions and refrigerators sales to be more than double this year with VU being its top-selling TV brand. Altogether, TV sales in India are projected to rise to $14.7 billion in 2017 from $8.3 billion in 2014, according to India Brand Equity Foundation and TechSci research report.
As India festive seasons draw close, Flipkart has decided to add more warehouses to pose a challenge to the rival Amazon India.
"We've worked relentlessly over the last few years to open up new warehouses. The count of warehouses (for large appliances) is now 10. For the festival of Diwali, this count will go up to 17," added Karwa.
Although, Amazon India has more count and opened new warehouses for high priced products like appliances, Flipkart still has an upper edge here as it owns a major stake in after – sales service provider called Jeeves Consumer Services Pvt. Ltd.
