Flipkart sells most number of smartphones in 2018; followed by Amazon and Paytm
Exclusive partnerships with smartphone brands by ecommerce operators helped Flipkart amass a large share of the online smartphone market, according to phone recommendation platform, PhoneCurry.
A large number of exclusive tie-ups with smartphone brands helped Flipkart pip Amazon India to be become the largest smartphone seller in 2018, also the year, when India overtook the US to become the second largest smartphone market after China.
A recent research report by PhoneCurry, a phone recommendation platform, said that homegrown ecommerce giant, Flipkart had a 47.6 percent market share in the online smartphone market in calendar year 2018, vis-à-vis Amazon India’s 31.3 percent, while Paytm and other players had 11.2 percent and 9.9 percent market share, respectively.
Last month, however, the government banned ecommerce players from entering into such exclusive partnerships for merchandise. Mails sent to all the three companies weren’t answered till the time of publishing. (The article will be updated once we receive a response.)
The study, titled Trends in consumers preferences, added that one of the reasons for Flipkart beating Amazon India in the smartphone game was the fact that the former had exclusive partnerships for a lot of popular Xiaomi phones in India. However, the study added a caveat that the sample size for the survey was the 239,497 'buy now' clicks that happened on PhoneCurry in 2018.
Sahil Bajaj, founder and CEO, PhoneCurry, said,
“The store distribution data is based on 239,497 'buy now' clicks that happened on PhoneCurry in 2018 - clicks that took people to e-commerce stores to complete the purchase. The conversion to actual confirmed sales is a bit more tricky to track - most stores have a one-day cookie - so if the user goes from PhoneCurry to say Flipkart - but does not immediately buy - but buys say two days later - we can't track that. So, we use 'buy now' click data as a proxy here - the store distribution ratio for the click data should be a good proxy for actual sales data as well.”
But for the consumer observation sets, he added, they studied the behavioural mapping for approximately 2.2 million users who used PhoneCurry in 2018 to decide what phone to buy.
In another part of the report titled, Trends in smartphones launched in 2018, the study found out that Samsung topped the charts as far as launching a number of models in 2018 was concerned. While Samsung launched 33 models, Huawei and Xiaomi followed closely, launching 23 and 22 models, respectively.
Talking about price and specs, the report said 75 percent of the smartphone models launched last year were in the sub 20K bracket. As people started consuming more and more of online contents and videos, smartphones users are increasingly going for minimum bezels and bigger screen phones.
It said, “people demanding larger screens to consume videos, and with the growth of the tall display trend, the smartphone screen size continued its upward trend. The proportion of screens above 5.6 inches (earlier considered to be phablet territory) was about 61 percent.”
With the selfie craze yet to abate, smartphones having dual cameras were a rage last yeah. The report added that share of dual camera smartphones in the total online smartphone sales increased to 46.3 percent in 2018, from 14.16 percent in 2017.
