CASE STUDY ON

FLIPKART.COM
BY-
NIKHIL TRIPATHI(12MCMB10)
TARUN MEHROTRA(12MCMB11)
SUDHIR KUMAR PANDEY(12MCMB14)
(M.TECH IT)

INTRODUCTION
 Flipkart is an Indian e-commerce company founded by SACHIN BANSAL
and BINNY BANSAL in October, 2007. Initially, they focused only on online
sales of books but later expanded to other products.

Today as per Alexa traffic ranking, Flipkart is among top 20 Indian websites
and has been credited with being India’s largest online book seller with over 11
million titles on offer.

FUNDING
Initially self-funded with Rs. 400,000.
Later raised two round of funding from Accel India and Tiger Global
Management.

EXPANSION OF FLIPKART
• 2010- branched out to selling CDs, DVDs, mobile phones and accessories,
cameras, computers, computer accessories and peripherals

• 2011- pens & stationery, other electronic items such as home appliances,
kitchen appliances, personal care gadgets, health care products etc.

• 2012 - added A.C, air coolers, school supplies, office supplies, art supplies
& life style products.

• Considered sometimes as amazon of India

LATEST LAUNCHES BY FLIPKART

FLYTE- A digital music store : Flipkart’s own digital music
downloads store Flyte now live, an iTunes of India for music. Flipkart now
hold the largest collection of music spread across various genres including
movie songs, Film/OST, devotional and spiritual, Hindustani, Carnatic, Pop,
Rock, Indipop and others Indian languages. Recently only Flipkart
 had acquired Mime360 a Mumbai-based digital content platform company
which manages music streaming for popular Indian labels like Saregama,
Universal Music and Inreco and also delivers music content to publishers
like Gaana, Myusic and iMusti.

Flyte provides DRM (Digital Rights Management) free MP3 files at

prices starting from Rs 6 a song and Rs 25 for an album. Users can listen to
a 30-second clip before making their purchase. Music purchase from Flyte is
currently restricted to users in India only.

Flyte-An online e-book store: Flipkart.com's digital store Flyte has

forayed into the eBooks category. To read these eBooks one needs to
download the Flyte eBooks app. At present, this app is available only on the
Android platform but will be making its way soon to Windows 8. It is not
clear by when can one expect this app to be rolled out on other platforms
such as iOS and BlackBerry.

The Flyte eBooks store currently has 100,000 books starting from Rs. 30.
There are also about 4,000 free titles available to encourage Indian readers.

AFFILIATE Program: The Flipkart affiliate program is a great way for

you to earn commissions by placing product banners or links on your
website to refer users to the Flipkart.com website. You can earn up to 6%
every time a user clicks on the banner/link and makes a purchase on our site.
Flipkart.com pays commission to affiliates depending on category of product
sold via their website, The referral rates are stated below:

- Books :6%
- Mobiles & Accessories : 1%
- Computers : 0.5%
- Cameras : 2%
- Digital :10%
- Games & Consoles : 1%
- Movies & TV Shows : 4%
- Music : 4%
- Audio & MP3 Players : 1%
- Personal & Health Care : 1%
- Home & Kitchen : 1%
 - TV & Video : 0.5%
- Pens & Diaries : 4%
- Watches : 8%
- Leather & Travel Accessories : 8%
- Health & Beauty : 4%
- Toys : 4%
- Baby Care : 4%

TECHNOLOGY BEING USED

Client-side Programming Language
JAVASCRIPT: JavaScript is a lightweight, object-oriented, cross-
platform scripting language, mainly used within web pages. As a result, their
GUI is quite light, efficient and effective. Some of the processing is done on
the client-side only which reduces the upload and download bandwidth and
server resources as well.

Markup Language
XHTML Strict 1.0: Strict version of XHTML.
Advantages:
- Compatibility: Because XHTML documents are written in compliance
with the rules of XML, XML-processing programmes can effortlessly convert
an XHTML file to another format (e.g. PDF, RSS or RTF).

- Sustainability: Web applications tend towards XML. Using XHTML

now instead of HTML makes any future conversion of the website easier.

Character Encoding
 UTF-8: UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length
character encoding for Unicode, which is backwards compatible with ASCII.
Advantages:
- there is no advantage to use utf-8 charset but for some languages like
Greek, Armenian , Arabic and farsi you have to use utf-8 charset because every
character in these languages use 2 byte for store in database and utf-8 is
standard charset for multibytes languages.

Site Elements
Gzip Compression: Gzip (GNU zip) is a file compression algorithm.
Advantages:
- Decrease Bandwidth Usage & Increase Page Views – When
you enable Gzip on your web pages, the compressed files will
decrease the average page load size, therefore, decreasing
bandwidth usage. This makes it much more convenient for viewers
to access and navigate through your website with faster loading
pages as well as making the usage of your web server resources
more efficient.

-Increase Search Engine Indexing – Enabling Gzip compression

allows web spiders to crawl your web pages faster, which means the faster
they crawl through your website, the more pages per day they can index.

IPv6: The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) provides amongst others a

vastly larger address space than the preceding version 4. We consider a
website to support IPv6 if a 128-bit addresses is assigned to it, regardless of
the content delivered at that address.

-According to webstatsdomain.com,"Ipv6.flipkart.com is ranked 275 in the

world (among the 30 million domains), a low rank means that this website
gets lots of visitors.
-This site is relatively popular among users in the India.
-It gets 96.6% from India.
- Ipv6.flipkart.com has 75% seo score.
SSL Certificate Authority
Entrust: Entrust is an IT security service provider, also operating as SSL
certificate authority.
Registrar: GoDaddy is the registrar for the domain name http://flipkart.com

Web Server
Nginx 1.2.2: Nginx (pronounced as "engine X") is a lightweight open
source web server developed by Igor Sysoev.
Advantages:
- Nginx (pronounced “engine x”) is a high performance web server, caching
proxy and a Layer 7 load balancing solution. Millions of web sites on
the Internet benefit from using Nginx because of its extreme
performance, scalability, reliability, flexibility and security. Removes the
problem of C10k because it uses event-driven (asynchronous)
architecture rather than using threads for serving the clients concurrently.

Some details about the domain

SOME SCREENSHOTS FOR FLIPKART.COM

Details of the SSL certificate of flipkart.com
 Details about 2 web servers

Details about DNS servers and IPv6 Address(below)

 STRATEGIES
Internet web strategy- Flipkart is using Google AD, blogs, social
networking such as FB and twitter, youtube for its expansion.
Social media used as feedback mechanism.

Flipkart’s fans on Facebook - 1,112,431.

On Twitter-22500 followers

WAREHOUSE LOCATIONS
Flipkart is having its warehouses in the cities: Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi,
Hyderabad, Mumbai, Noida, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Bhiwandi. Moreover, Flipkart
delivers products to 95 cities which includes 2500 pincodes across India.

HIRING
Hiring or rather right hiring is one of the critical factors contributing to a
startup’s success, So some of the key criteria that the Flipkart team looks at while
hiring are :
• They typically don’t look at specialists to come on board rather they look
out for generalists with the attitude to learn and adapt to the fast pace of
growth.

• Everyone in the team on a collective and individual level needs to have a

high sense of ownership. This is something which clearly differentiates a
high performing organization from the others.

• Hiring process is the best brand campaign – Transparency in hiring is

one of the best ways to attract the right kind of talent.

• Majority of flipkart are employed in customer support divison.

FLIPKART SUCCESS MANTRA

• Great Customer Service.
• Easy to use website,hassle free payment system.
• Cash on delivery- Almost 60% of sales.
• COD created trust in minds of Indian Customer who were always weary of
making payment online.
• Focussed on user expierence-Only provide relevant information.
• EMI option.
• 30 days replacement policy.
• Only CSD having 24*7 customer support functioning .
• Prepaid wallet feature- Allow shopers to store money onsite and use it to
purchase item, without having to reach for their credit card cash for each
transaction.
• Best GUI for digital products- provides comparison methods among the
products which most of the sites are lacking.

THREATS
No major threats till now.
Challenge- Entry of Amazon.com in India.
 COMPARISON
Some e-commerce sites like Homeshop18 provide free Shipping across all
products on its website while flipkart provide free shipping on the
products having costs more than 300/-.
There are some commercial websites like indiaplaza, landmark, bookadda
and infibeam that sells their books at lower price than that of flipkart.

RECOMMENDATIONS
There are some of the points reagarding the improvements in the services and
products of FLIPKART.They are as follows:

You can start up city based library services wherein you deliver us the books
for a particular period of time.
You can create packages of products for a group of people , preferably for a
group of college students or a group of people leaving in the same locality
...that could give you fixed delivery stations.
You can look towards becoming a direct interface between two customers
who want to exchange 2nd hand products
There is no customer loyalty yet. I go for the guys who give me the lowest
price for the same product. Since, I know the service levels at all these are
comparable, it comes down to cost. That is a hard one to fight as a business.
It should provide services at international levels.
Claiming of vendors via a certificate that a particular product has been given
to Flipkart for its selling.
Domain of the product delivery should be reachable to remote areas.
Less information on footwear and clothing products at the first look. For
e.g.,

(Please see the screenshot below)

 In the above example, users can’t find the various sizes of the shoes which
are available. They get this information only when they open the detailed
information about the product. This results in a little waste of time while surfing
for the appropriate products.