Title: Top e-retailers of India: business model and components

Authors: Prateek Kalia

Addresses: Department of Research, Innovation and Consultancy, Punjab Technical University Jalandhar-Kapurthala Highway, Near Pushpa Gujral Science City, Kapurthala-144601, Punjab, India

Abstract: Thoughtful insights on business model components of top e-retailers based in India have been achieved through content analysis of reliable books, reports, journals and the web. Six major e-retailers are compared on the basis of monthly traffic data obtained from similarweb.com. It is observed that online retail is a meager 0.5% of overall retail in India and future potential is huge. Due to FDI restrictions all top e-retailers under this study except HS18 prefer marketplace model in pure/hybrid form and earn revenue through transaction fee. Their marketing strategy essentially includes social media and internet. They operate with lean manpower and functional departmentalisation except Flipkart which employs massive 10,000 plus employees and prefers to recruit generalists. National capital region and Bangalore are preferred locations for establishment of their headquarters. This review will be useful to businesses and researchers interested in developing/benchmarking successful e-retail business model to win and sustain competition.

Keywords: e-retailing; e-tailing; electronic retailing; business models; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEMR.2015.073450

International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, 2015 Vol.6 No.4, pp.277 - 298

Received: 23 Dec 2014
Accepted: 07 Feb 2015

Published online: 09 Dec 2015 *

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