Flipkart India, the e-commerce big owned by Walmart, is utilizing social movies and livestreams to transform younger customers spending numerous time on their smartphones into loyal clients.
Utilizing movies to showcase and promote merchandise is among the main new forays at Flipkart, Neha Agrahari, a senior director on the retailer, mentioned in an interview to Bloomberg Information.
Whereas the idea of on-line retailers utilizing movies to spice up gross sales has been round for years, Flipkart hopes this technique will give it an edge over rivals like Amazon.com Inc. and Reliance Industries in India. The world’s most-populous nation has about 650 million smartphone customers — of whom over 270 million make purchases on-line, making it the second-largest e-retail market forward of the US.
About 200 million customers engaged with movies on Flipkart whereas buying within the first half of 2025, up from 75 million a 12 months in the past, information from the retailer confirmed.
“Customers desire to observe a video and decide” when buying, making video commerce the apparent course to take, Agrahari mentioned. Two in three Gen-Z customers now desire this format of buying, with 65 p.c of video and streaming engagement coming from India’s smaller cities.
The agency launched video choices on its app about 18 months in the past to advertise every part from sunscreen to devices. It additionally options livestreams to reply consumers’ questions on merchandise in real-time and let consumers work together with influencers.
Flipkart’s foray into this phase, together with different Indian platforms like SoftBank Group-backed Meesho, follows a development in China and different components of Asia the place prime retailers routinely put money into selling objects through dwell movies, hiring influencers to hawk every part from lipstick to protein powders.
Video-led buying is at present driving gross sales in trend, magnificence, private care and residential decor classes, Agrahari mentioned, including that the subsequent transfer is to incorporate electronics and fitness-related content material.
The platform is constructing bodily studios within the Indian cities of Gurugram, Mumbai, and Bengaluru to supply “seamless” taking pictures and modifying expertise to its video creators, Agrahari mentioned.
Person engagement numbers for each day livestreaming present the technique is paying off. The quantity is up 17 occasions in comparison with the earlier 12 months, in accordance with Agrahari. The surge is boosted by product movies which embody clips of customers dipping t-shirts in water to see if the colours bleed and utilizing quite a lot of meals in kitchen home equipment to check reliability.
The “stress checks” work for livestreams and viewers wish to see extra, she mentioned. “We do not thoughts dropping a cell phone simply to show that it’s sturdy sufficient.”
© 2025 Bloomberg LP
(This story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
