Flipkart equips customers with enhanced decision-making tools with weRead acquisition
weRead, the increasingly popular, social book recommendation portal, boasts of over 3 million readers and 60 million books
Buyers on Flipkart can now make informed decisions based on recommendations from people within their social network, detailed reviews and user-generated ratings.
Flipkart, India’s largest online bookstore and a leading player under India’s e-commerce firmament today announced that it has acquired weRead.com, the largest social network based book recommendation and review platform. The weRead acquisition allows Flipkart to leverage advanced recommendation technologies and social graph information to enhance customer experience.
With more than 3 million readers and 60 million books, weRead captures user-generated information such as who, within your social network, has marked a book as a favourite, detailed reviews and user ratings of books. The weRead application is available across all popular social network sites such as Facebook, Orkut, Yahoo, MySpace and Hi5. Considering that purchase of books, as a category, is driven by reviews and recommendations, weRead provides an edge as it would immediately showcase community verdicts on any book. The weRead component will make buying online at Flipkart a heightened social experience. Owing to its community-driven, independent nature, weRead will retain its own brand identity, even after the purchase by Flipkart.
According to Sachin Bansal, CEO, Flipkart, “This is one more step in our journey to provide the best possible service experience to our customers. Acquiring weRead will take our relationship with our customers to a wider plane where we will be their partner in the entire book reading experience – right from purchase to referrals. This would enable us to suggest the most relevant books to our readers based on their previous purchase patterns as well as the kind of books they and their friends like. At Flipkart, all our growth till now has been organic in nature. However, to deliver the best in class service to our customers, we have started to look at acquisitions that will complement our current service offerings. weRead is one such step in this direction.”
According to the spokesperson at weRead, "Lulu is pleased to have completed the successful sale of weRead.com to Flipkart. We believe weRead users will be well served by the team at Flipkart".
About Flipkart:Clocking sales of more than 1 million items so far and currently speeding along at the rate of more than a book sold every minute, Bangalore based Flipkart.com is the largest online book store and a leading name under the e-commerce firmament in India. The company was started in 2007 by former classmates at IIT Delhi and later colleagues at Amazon.com, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. Flipkart has been funded by Accel India. As part of their expansion plans in the e-commerce space, Flipkart recently announced the launch of 4 new product categories, i.e. Movies, Music, Games and Mobiles. Flipkart also offers ‘Cash on Delivery’, making it possible for anyone across the country with internet access to shop online for books and other products. Currently Flipkart has over 7 million titles (books) listed ranging across all categories. It has grown ten times over the last one year and aims to touch the Rs 100 crore mark by March 2011.
Flipkart has a team of more than 300 members and currently operates from offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. Please visit www.flipkart.com to know more.
About weRead:
weRead.com is the largest social network based book recommendation and review platform with over 3 million readers and 60 million book titles. weRead enables its member readers to list, rate and write reviews about the books they are reading or have read in the past and share reviews about those on their favourite social networks like Facebook, Orkut, Yahoo, MySpace and Hi5, thereby creating an ever evolving repository of information about books.
weRead was set up in 2007 by Ugenie, a start-up based out of Bangalore. Ugenie was then acquired by the US based on-demand publishing company, Lulu.com. Please visit www.weRead.com to know more.