The retail trio in India has planned a content war against e-commerce behemoth Amazon.com. The three major e-commerce and retail majors, which includes Paytm, Future Group and Flipkart, are all set to invest more than $100 million in producing and releasing entertainment content for their userbase. All these efforts are being made to give a stiff competition to Amazon in the flourishing Indian e-commerce market.
Flipkart Content Business Could Be A Threat for Amazon India?
As revealed by the trusted sources, Paytm – the digital payments giant – has already announced recently that it would be hosting a bunch of new features in ‘Inbox’, which would be its in-app messaging service. It would not only allow the users to chat but would also include live TV, cricket, entertainment videos, news and also a couple of games. The planning has concluded, and the company is all set to invest approximately $30 million in this field.
The second player, which is the Kishore Biyani-led Future Group, has planned to make considerably huge investments into developing a separate entertainment space for its customers on the organization’s various apps. Not only have these things been discussed thoroughly, but the company has also decided to invest around close to $14.5 million for powering the company’s platform with artificial intelligence and machine learning to reinforce entertainment content. Besides, the company has engaged numerous entertainment content suppliers and various movie theatre chains for the purpose of providing tickets to its users, both online and offline.
But, that’s not all, there is more for Amazon to be worried about; the Indian e-commerce behemoth Flipkart has also tightened its shoelaces to welcome the entertainment content on its platform. Moving forward in this direction, this organization has held discussions with several companies. However, its plans to do the same have now been put on hold, owing to finish its acquisition by Walmart Inc, that happened recently. Nonetheless, the plans are already made to invest $50 million initially to include entertainment content on its platform, once the Walmart deal is completed.
The management of Flipkart believes that this is a very logical decision taken for the benefit of the company. The step will make sure that its customers spend hours on its platform. By this move, the firm would not only be able to garner advertisement revenue, but also gain royalty from content providers.
Flipkart has not commented anything on the reported development. However, if we trust the rumours, the trio will most probably make the intended investments by the end of this year.
The trio is gearing up to counter the growing influence of Amazon on Indian consumers by all means. The US e-commerce major is leaving no stone unturned to keep its customer based engaged as much as possible. Amazon has been entertaining its customer base by streaming the latest TV shows and films from India and abroad via Prime membership. Basically, entertaining content ensures the consumer to stick to the app and visit it daily, which otherwise might not happen just for the sake of buying items on the online portal. This will allow Amazon to know more about customers preferences by tracking their data besides doing a cross-channel marketing of its products/services.
Paytm has similar thoughts too. It said that adding entertainment content would make its millions of users, who currently transact only once or twice a month, to visit the portal on a daily basis. In the beginning, it would rely on the content provided by its content provider partners. While nothing is official yet, but Paytm might bank upon its largest stakeholder Alibaba for international content, which runs a production house.
It’s a known fact that Indian e-commerce players have scratched the surface yet. E-commerce sales in India accounted for just 2.2% of total retails sales in 2017. It’s evident that the game is about to begin, and it would be interesting to see which player emerges as the ultimate winner. For consumers, however, it is a win-win situation, as they would feast on quality content from so many platforms without any hassle.
