Digital Transformation, e-Commerce

How to Make an e-commerce Website like Flipkart?

Written by Pratham Yogendra
Posted on - 10 min read

Flipkart is a brand that revolutionized the eCommerce industry in India. This case study focused on a collaboration between Business & Design, Digital-Consumerism, Budgeting, Technology, and Marketing.
And the above-specified combination allowed Flipkart to stand out and compete alongside a global competitor such as Amazon.

1. Why do you need to learn from Flipkart?

Well, every story provides you with a value to learn. This content piece will help you understand Flipkart’s business and operational strategies.
And to understand this better, here’s a preface about Flipkart. In the Indian market, Flipkart started as an early adapter in the eCommerce sector to primarily sell books. The idea was to develop an online platform to sell books nationwide.

2. What does Flipkart do to sell online?

People often credit FlipKart for being the seller of the products displayed, but Flipkart isn’t the seller in most cases.
Flipkart doesn’t just sell in-house products on their platform but also provides other sellers with a digital marketplace to sell their products.
To understand better, here’s a difference between Single & Multi-Vendor eCommerce Platforms.

A.Single Vendor eCommerce Platform:

Think of it this way: you own a store and digitally transform it to sell products online via a proprietary website with your store’s name.
Ans A single vendor eCommerce Platform consists of a customized website based on your offline store and its products. That means you are the only vendor selling on the platform.
To build such a platform, you don’t need a business compulsive business strategy, as you can make modifications to your existing business strategy to adapt to the digital consumer base.

B.Multi-Vendor eCommerce Platform:

A multi-vendor eCommerce platform acts as a digital marketplace similar to the one in your city where there are 100s of stores catering to multiple product varieties.
It allows multiple sellers to connect online and easily to digital consumers without focusing much on advertising and marketing as the aggregator takes care.
You’ll need to work on a solid business strategy to build such an eCommerce space. You can understand the pointers to consider whilst formulating a plan.

3. How does Flipkart sell online?

That is where you’ll need to focus the most. Flipkart works on the following aspects, and this will help you understand what they do and how you can build your website like Flipkart and attract the digital consumer base.

A.Business & Design:

Remember when we spoke about how Flipkart drafted its way into selling anything a consumer would need?
Well, that’s the business aspect, and you must understand it to design your website correctly.
Here’s how you can start. Since you know the products you sell in your offline store, you’d be building a store around the same products you sell. We’d suggest making a list of the products or the category of products that your offline-consumer base purchases the most from your store and use it to your advantage in the design process by dividing the product into three categories:
1. Primary
2. Secondary
3. Tertiary
For instance, The consumers mostly prefer Flipkart for two main product categories:
a.Consumer Electronics
b.Apparels( Men, Women and Kids)
And Flipkart understood it, so they placed the menus that led the consumers to the consumer electronics and apparel at the start of the list.

Flipkart main page

That means, They strategically placed the categories of products that the consumers primarily purchase and added a search bar making it easy for them to search, browse, compare and buy.
And even though you can book Flights via Flipkart, the feature is placed in the tertiary part of the list. That is because Flipkart also helps you book flights, it might be the feature that the consumers least used, so they placed it in the tertiary part of the menu.
An important point we’d like to stress is that Flipkart followed the same design principle based on compartmentalizing.

B.Digital Consumerism:

Was their understanding of business and design everything that led to their website becoming a tier-1 brand pan India?
Well, not exactly. The business and design were only possible thanks to their on-point projections of the expectations of a digital consumer.
In simple terms, they took a few pages out of the eCommerce brands across the world and used them to understand what a digital consumer looks forward to whilst purchasing a product. Indirectly, they projected the customer experience they need to provide to thrive in the business.
For instance, Flipkart acts as a mere aggregator, and they could easily understand the requirements of being an aggregator. That means that with at least 10,000 products sold by a minimum of 5,000 sellers on their platform, they predicted what an average digital customer might need to purchase a product successfully.
That means the customer will not have seen the product in real life, experienced its quality, or know anything about the store or seller. The own way they can interact with the product is by:

 A. High-Resolution Images:

This feature allows you to see a high-resolution product image, which you can zoom in to understand its visual details.

Samsung Frame-Flipkart product image

b.Accurate Product Descriptions:

In addition, since you can’t hire a salesperson to explain the product’s description via Google Meet, you can alternatively write about everything relevant and necessary with regards to the product.
For example, a lamp sold, and even though there’s a high-resolution image of the same, the customer will want to know more about it in terms of connectivity or the bulb they can use. In simple terms, the product specification is a vital content piece that a customer will want to read any day over images.

Flipkart product Description and Specification

c. Question and Answers:

Flipkart understood that even though images and product descriptions would help a user understand a product, the user would still have queries that can only resolve by the store or the seller selling it. Thus, they adopted the Q&A system to connect the customer to the sellers directly.

Flipkart product Q/A

d. Reviews and Ratings:

And since Flipkart was to cater to both SME Sellers/Vendors and customers pan India in a number of thousands (later evolving into lakhs), they’d have to provide justice to both the parties.

And to provide equal opportunities among sellers/vendors, FlipKart provided them with an individual mini-store page where they share the products they sell with the reviews of the product and the seller being displayed.

 product reviews

C.Budgeting:

That is the most critical aspect of building a website and a brand like Flipkart. Budgeting isn’t just about allocating investment properly. It also is about understanding the actual market value of every asset.
It’s about making sure that you properly spend your investment. You don’t purchase any service/product which is overpriced than its original value whilst setting up an eCommerce business.
That means saving money and diverting funds towards critical services/necessities.

D.Technology:

Now, to make it all possible, technology plays four critical roles in the process:

a. Experience optimization:

To make sure that their customers and sellers can purchase and sell products from across the country, they’d have to be present on all the platforms available at a blazing speed.

b. Omni-Channel Presence:

Flipkart works seamlessly across devices and provides the same purchase experience on all platforms.

 OmniChannel presence

c.Ease of delivery, returns, and replacements:

Since it’s an online store, Flipkart provides Ease of delivery by delivering across pan India based on customers’ needs and even hosts returns and replacements according to the customers’ needs.

d.Inventory and purchase Management:

Also, since they projected the customer’s demands indirectly, they built an effective order management system that provided all the information about the product, from the specific details of the store to that of the customer allowing everyone involved to stay in the loop about the product and its status.

Order Page

And the payment flexibility offered by Flipkart was tremendous. It was one of the first tier-1 brands to introduce CoD.

4. How to make a website like Flipkart?

And this is where the recipe that you are looking for starts. The way Flipkart works is that it uses a combination of a Content Management System connected to the automation services across platforms.
And to build one for yourself, you could either:

A.Build a standalone omnichannel digital space from scratch:

It is a relatively efficient and custom-tailored method of building a digital space. But, the efficiency and the personalization come at an expense.

B.Integrate an existing CMS on top of your design and automate it to fit according to your needs:

This method allows you to cater across omnichannel platforms in the digital space with the same amount of design customization. This method is preferred across the industry because it already comes with the tools required to build an eCommerce site at a reasonable price.

Here’s what you need to do:

a.Domain and Hosting:

Domain and hosting are the digital equivalents to your store’s address and physical space.GoDaddy and BigRock are two significant players who could help you purchase the domain and host the same by sitting at your house.

Godaddy, BigRock

b.CMS-Platform:

To save time without compromising on quality, we recommend that you prefer powerful open source platforms like WordPress or WooCommerce to develop your website on top of it.

WooCommerce

c.Preferred Payment Gateway:

To make sure that your customer can make payments in ways that are comfortable to them and to make sure that you get the payments cleared in time, we recommend that you prefer a reliable payment gateway that caters to all your requirements.

For instance, RazorPayPAYTM for Business, and CCAvenue are the most trusted payment gateways used in the market due to their flexibility and Ease of processing on both the customer and the brand fronts.

Payment gateways

d.Multi-Platform developer:

You need a developer who can build on WordPress to do it right if we would like to talk about WooCommerce CMS and integrate your preferred payment gateway to ensure that your eCommerce website works across all the digital platforms without any issues.

e.Automation system:

You need an automation system that works across platforms to notify every person responsible in the process of purchase to delivery and post-delivery services about the product status.

We at Nexgen Innovators could help you build just what you need.

 

5.Digital OutReach & Marketing:

Your marketing campaigns integrate with all the above factors to ensure that your customer returns to make more purchases. That includes sending a thank you email with a coupon code and offering your customers their birthday. It’s about caring about your customers and connecting to them in every way possible.
And the above are all the necessary pointers to keep in mind whilst building your eCommerce alternative to Flipkart.

 

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