Flipkart witnessed a 47% year-on-year (YoY) customer growth in Tier 3+ cities this past year. In Tier 3+ cities, the fashion category had the biggest YoY customer growth of 58%. Smartphones, audio devices, grooming products, fashion wearables (fashion jewelry, wallets, belts, sunglasses), men’s footwear, and household items were some of the top categories that were in high demand for shoppers in Tier 3+ cities.
The increasing adoption of customers from across the country, particularly Tier 3+ cities, was largely enabled by the rapid expansion of supply chain infrastructure and extended delivery partners.
Over 1 lakh kiranas onboarded with Flipkart make 30% of the 60 million+ deliveries made per month across the country.
These kirana partners also witnessed an increase of over 30%+ in their average delivery incomes compared to last year, which helped drive the adoption of e-commerce across smaller cities.
Flipkart’s hyperlocal delivery business witnessed a 25X increase in orders compared to last year. The share of hyperlocal orders within total grocery orders on Flipkart increased from 1% in 2020 to over 17% in 2021.
Flipkart continues to gain ground in this segment with Flipkart Quick, which enables consumers to get their products delivered within 90 minutes of placing an order online. Customers can place their orders at any time of day and have them delivered between 6 AM and midnight.
Flipkart Grocery business has seen a 2X growth in revenue and customers respectively in 2021. It is on track to service customers in 1800 cities by the end of 2021, including Ajmer, Amritsar, Bhuj, Bokaro, Daman & Diu, Dehradun and Kanyakumari, among others.
With e-commerce adoption rising fast in Tier 3+ cities, the share of Indian-language users on Flipkart increased from 12% in Q4 2020 to 18% in Q4 2021. Coming to popular browsing categories, Smartphones account for 57% of regional language traffic, followed by fashion wearables (44%), and audio devices (39%) respectively.
Tier 3+ cities had the highest percentage of non-English users (22%), indicating that regional languages will continue to play an important role in attracting and retaining consumers from these markets. Among the 11 Indian language interfaces on Flipkart, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali are the most widely used languages on the platform, growing by over 2X over the past 1 year. Bengali and Malayalam are witnessing the fastest growth in terms of adoption among new customers.
Flipkart’s Voice Search witnessed nearly 3 million daily queries this year, with Tier 3+ cities constituting more than half of the overall voice queries. Patna, Ranchi, Surat and Bhagalpur are among the top 25 cities.
The findings of a recent study by Flipkart have revealed that merchants, kiranas, and MSMEs witnessed increased growth this year as compared to 2020.
