A Project

report
Presented to the Faculty of the
School of Management & Entrepreneurship
AURO University
Surat

In Partial Fulfilment
Of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Business Administration

Submitted by:
Gopi Khunt

Submitted to: Dr.

Monica Suri
International Marketing
November 2014

Company profile (Flipkart)

Flipkart.com is an Indian based e-commerce company started by Binny Bansal and Sachin
Bansal, who previously worked at Amazon.com. Post their experience, they ventured into a
similar e-business idea and launched it in India. Flipkart.com works with the aim of making
products and goods easily available at the doorsteps of anyone who has Internet access.
Flipkart.com started off from selling books in 2007, based in Bangalore, and entered then
consumer electronics category with the launch of mobile phones, in September 2010. Since
then it kept on adding more new products categories including books, mobiles, computers,
cameras, home & electronic gadgets& appliances, In addition to these very Recently,
Flipkart.com has also widened its foray by entering into the emerging digital content market
with the recent launch of Flyte, the digital music store & is still continuing to enlarge its
product portfolio. It is now one of the leading e-commerce players in India, currently ranks
at the top
20websites in India1, spread in 37 cities, with 11.5 million plus book titles, 14 different
categories, 3 million plus registered users and sale of 30000 items a day. It provides onlineshoppers a memorable online-shopping experience because of its innovative services like:
Cash on Delivery,
30-day replacement policy,
Easy Monthly Instalment options (EMI),
Free shipping
Discounted prices & deals

The Online Megastore

T ype

Private

Industry

Internet, Online
retailing

Founded

5 September
2007

Founders

Sachin Bansal
Binny Bansal

Headquarters

Bangalore,
Karnataka, India

Area served

India

Key people

Sachin Bansal
Binny Bansal

Services

Electronic
commerce

Revenue

US$ 1 billion
(gross
merchandise
2013-14)[1]

Employees

15000 (2014)[2]

Subsidiaries

Myntra

Website

Flipkart.com

Organisational Chart: (Flipkart)

Vision: To become AMAZON of India

Mission: Providing a delightful customer experience.
Objective: Making books easily available to anyone who has internet access

Consumer behaviour
In India there is hesitancy in using an online portal for purchase of goods because of various
reasons. The most prominent of which is that an online payment gateway is not user friendly.
However, Flipkart.coms most outstanding feature is its COD or Cash on Delivery pricing
strategy, which gives the user the experience of online shopping and the security of physical
shopping. Also, Flipkart.com has a 30-day replacement guarantee and an original product
warranty, which dispels all doubts from an online shoppers mind.

Global Identity:
Flipkart ships books to almost all of India's 21,000 PIN codes and covers over a hundred
cities for its entire product portfolio of 20 categories like consumer electronics, office
supplies, watches, and health and beauty products.

7Flipkart wants to expand its presence in fashion and apparel that promise average margins of
20 to 30 per cent, compared to categories such as electronics that promise less than half those
levels of margins and hardly cover shipment charges. Online sellers with a big presence in
fashion attract a higher number of visitors, too. Myntra, for instance, clocked over 24 million
unique visitors in December and Jabong nearly 20 million, as per data from online tracker
comScore. Flipkart, despite being a broad-category seller, in comparison, recorded 13.22
million uni- que visitors. (Sachin says the Flip kart number is inaccurate, but declines to
disclose in-house numbers.)
The company said that it will accept payments made using Visa, MasterCard, and American
Express credit/debit cards in 21 countries outside India: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada,
Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US. We believe
this will allow international users to send gifts to friends and family in India.

Rakuten.com
Rakuten Group is one of the world's leading Internet service companies, providing a variety
of consumer- and business-focused services including e-commerce, eBooks & eReading,
travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and
professional sports. Rakuten Group is expanding globally and currently has operations
throughout Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania.
Formerly Buy.com, Rakuten.com (www.rakuten.com) will continue its mission to deliver an
outstanding shopping experience to over 18 million customers and offering a broad selection
of goods and merchants. Rakuten.com is a true marketplace which empowers retailers to build
individual relationships and go the extra mile for their customers. As opposed to the vast
majority of faceless, transactional e-commerce marketplaces which also sell directly to
consumers, Rakuten.com is focused on building relationships with merchants and consumers,
differentiating on experience and not price alone.
Rakuten.com's focus is on delivering more than just a transactional experience to consumers,
instead making connections between merchants and buyers via its discovery shopping, video
content and reviews. Rakuten.com believes that ecommerce should be entertainment and fun
for customers.

Rakuten.com offers its merchants the ability to customize their presence on the marketplace the control of the brand is therefore given back to the merchant, allowing them to increase
customer loyalty and build sales. The model provides three key elements for retailers looking
to increase online sales - the system, the traffic, and the expertise.
Rakuten.com is a true shopping market that differs from the vending machine model and
nameless, faceless offerings delivered by other online retail markets and strives to remind
its valued customers that there are actual people behind the veil of buying online,
emphasizing that consumers have a choice about who and where they buy from.
Fundamentally, consumers should be able to buy from people, not the internet. This approach
allows merchants to truly differentiate and succeed in an increasingly crowded online world.

A New Era
Buy.com joined the Rakuten family in 2010, making the joint businesses combined into one
of the world's largest online retail marketplaces. We offer consumers more than 90 million
products from 38,500 merchants around the globe. Buy.com becoming Rakuten.com is the
next step of that relationship as the Rakuten Group increasingly unifies its brand
internationally. This transition will open up the Rakuten.com (formerly Buy.com)
marketplace to customers globally, as well as introducing merchants and retailers from
around the world to its North American customer base. Both its merchants and its consumers
will benefit from this open, global market. We are excited at the possibilities to come, and we
hope you continue to join us in our global growth.

Buy.com is nowRakuten.com

More than 17 million products

Everyday low prices

Ranked among the top 3 ecommerce companies in the world

Rakuten.com

Founders

Scott Blum[1]

Headquarters

Aliso Viejo, California[2]

Key people

Masatada "Seichu" Kobayashi, President/CEO

Products

Retail: Computers, Electronics, Books,

Movies, Video Games, Apparel, Health and
Beauty, etc.

Website

www.rakuten.com

Mission: To deliver outstanding shopping experience to over 18 million customer.

Rakuten's Greatest Strength: Our confidence for having created by ourselves the biggest
online shopping mall in Japan.
Goal: Our goal is not becoming No.1 in Japan but becoming the No.1 Internet services
company in the world.
Global Identity:
For gaining international recognition it was imp for company to leave its imprint not only
within domestic companies but also in international boundaries. The company explores in this
countries Austri, Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, japan, Malasiya, spain, Taiwan,
Singapore, Thailand, united kingdom, US.

Consumer behaviour
Consumer behaviour is the study of how, where, when and why we conduct the exchange
elements of our lives to satisfy our needs and desires. It is fundamental to marketing as
marketing is concerned with supplying and anticipating customer requirements; therefore
understanding how customers behave is at the very heart of the marketing concept.

Japanese consumers are changing in online shopping behaviour:

Japanese consumers have long been both distinctive and reassuringly predictable. Unlike their
counterparts in Europe and the United States, they eschewed low-priced goods, preferring
high- end department stores and pricier regional supermarkets. They were willing to pay high
prices for quality products, and their love of brands sparked the emergence of a mass-luxury
mmarket where owning expensive, exclusive products seemed essential rather than
aspirational. This combination helped boost the countrys retail sales to an estimated 135
trillion ($1.48 trillion) in 2008, second only to the United States. Yet Japans consumers are
rapidly changing, in four primary ways.
Consumer Behavior over Internet (Japanese)
According to them, One in four consumers indicated that they spend more time online
because of the tough economy and 53 percent of consumers said they spend about the same
amount. According to PriceGrabber survey, consumers are divided by age wise and then take
into account the online shopping to clearly shown that older age online consumers. Why is it
that? The answer is that older online consumers have so much impact on online consumer
behavior (Rodriguez, 2009, p. 3). Online shopping behavior depends on four factors such as
Shopping motives, personality variables, internet knowledge and experience and last factor is
shopping
Incentives. These are key determinants to influence the behavior of online consumers. Online
seekers are the main sources of online shopping. Online shoppers always want to seek
information within few clicks and reach to the most relevant information according to their
requirements such as competitive brands, best price offers, product specification and
consumer word-of-mouth.

Competitive Analysis: (Marketing Mix)

Flipkart.com
Product:
Website is great, easy to use, and easy to browse through the products, add products to wish
list or to a cart, get product reviews and opinions, pre-order products, make convenient
payments using different methods and better Search Engine Optimization.

Quality level of the products is absolutely fine E.g., if we take the quality of books available
in
Crossword and Landmark is same as the quality of books ordered by Flipkart.com.
Products are packed in such a way that they are Tamper proof, weather proof and breakage
proof.
Product line on Flipkart.com have warranties as promised by the brand of the product if
applicable. E.g., Bajaj MX 2 1200 Watts Iron with 2 Years Bajaj India Warranty and extra
paid warranty for the particular brand is available if applicable.

Place:

Channel type: Words of mouth (if we can say that) which has been key driver for their
growth.

When an order is placed they either serve the order from their inventory or procure the
book on demand from various suppliers and then deliver the customer.

As on date more than 80% orders of Flipkart are handled via warehouses which helps
in quick and efficient service.

We deliver orders in 1 day in Tier-I cities and 2-3 days in Tier II cities and 3-5 days
Tier III cities

Shipping and Courier would act as intermediaries in this process.

Warehouses are located in the following cities, often near airports.

Bangalore
Chennai
Delhi
Hyderabad
Mumbai
Noida
Pune
Kolkata

Price:

Price of the product taking account of various expenses such as Supplier expenses,
Transportation expenses, Packaging expenses, Shipping expenses, Courier expenses,

inventory maintenance expense, office and stationery expenses, sales and

advertisement expenses, taxes, depreciation, discount allowances and many more
expenses.

Roughly about 5-7% profit per book orders which indicates that generation of revenue
is on volume basis.

Differentiated themselves by giving best selections, best services at lowest best

possible prices.

Discounts up to 35% across all categories.

Upper edge in competitive pricing

Promotion:

Employees of divisions like Website, Business Planning and Analytics, ERP,

Business Development, Product Management and Marketing, Supply-Chain
Management and Customer Support are generating revenue for it.

Selection Criteria at Flipkart:-While years of experience are always beneficial for

a candidate, Flipkart's focus is to hire those who are able to consistently raise the
bar and introduce a variety of innovations to move this organization forward. As
Flipkart grows, we feel it is absolutely necessary that our employees are also able
to grow professionally with the organization.

Adequate Training as per their roles and responsibilities is given to them

accordingly and incentives.

Telephone Sales force is only 2% of the total employees focussing to reduce the
unsold/goods not much in demand.

Rakuten.com:
4ps
Product: Design new kind of clothes.
Price: Make sales on holiday.
Place: Make a mobile shop to sale the clothes.
Promotion: do more advertisement on TVs, Video on wheels.

LIMITATION, FINDINGS, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDISION

LIMITATION
1. Time was limited for a deep study analysis of the organization.
2. Study covers only two companies.
3. Some company documents are confidential in nature. So, it was not possible to
include all those items.

FINDINGS
1. Online shopping is increasing day by day because of job pressure so everything is
now needed handy so it will be good if they come up with more offerings as
compared to retail outlets.
2. Japan online done many mergers but still not able to capture the expected market.
CONCLUSION
1. Online shopping like flipkart and rakuten.com as we saw are doing well at
their positions but still somewhere rakuten.com needs to increase awareness and
try to get merger with many foreign countries to expand as well as diversify their
network to increase their market share.
2. Promotional activities of Japanese are very less compared to flipkart.

RECOMMENDATION:
1. Should start its own courier service to save expenses.
2. Make relationships with every possible supplier of Tier I cities as major revenue
comes from them.
3. Tie up with international suppliers.
4. Advertise more in Tier II and Tier III cities by hoarding and print media and
Transit advertising.
5. If affordable use movieplex advertising.
6. Have localization of content and website if extending business to foreingnations.
7. Sell textbooks as a band and magazine subscriptions or fortnightly magazines at

Flipkart.com in books category.

8. Sell Musical instruments in Music category.
9. Add a new category of Sports and Outdoor Category in your product line.