Snapdeal First E-tailer To Offer Flight, Bus Ticket Booking, Food Ordering

In an attempt to combat competition through innovation, Kunal Bahl-led Snapdeal on Monday announced the launch of flight & bus ticket bookings, hotel reservations and food ordering services on its platform thereby becoming the first e-tailer to do so.

The services, currently available on its android and iOS app, have been launched through a partnership with market leaders in each domain –Zomato, Cleartrip, UrbanClap and redBus.

Last year, Snapdeal stood second in terms of market share at 21-23 per cent just above Amazon which stood at 17-19 per cent, as per the latest report by RedSeer Consulting. However, Snapdeal continued to lose market share this year and was toppled by Amazon in March. In fact, Snapdeal’s gross merchandise value (GMV) grew just 90 per cent in the fiscal year ended March 2016 as against 301 per cent in the previous year, according to a presentation by SoftBank Group, Snapdeal's largest investor.

This integration between Snapdeal and service providers is said to help the e-tailer improve its online traffic as consumers can use Snapdeal as a one-stop solution for all their consumption needs. “With this, Snapdeal is foraying into the $100 billion market for online services, as yet untapped by any other e-commerce player,” Snapdeal said in a statement.

The service providers are listed on Snapdeal’s services section and according to the e-tailer, customers will also be able to avail exciting offers on these services on Snapdeal. Customer support will be actively provided by the partners and the call-center numbers will be prominently mentioned in all the web view footers, ticket details and order pages.

Commenting on the new initiative, Rohit Bansal, co-founder, Snapdeal said, “Online services is an industry potentially worth $100 billion by 2020 and is poised to play a huge role in driving habit commerce in India. As we build the country’s most reliable and frictionless commerce ecosystem, the introduction of services on Snapdeal is a big leap forward in catering to nearly all the consumption needs of our customers.”

We are thrilled to partner with Zomato, Cleartrip, UrbanClap and redBus to bring to our users the best of choices for food, travel and personal services. We will continue to add leading service providers from other categories in our journey to offer a single point access to the widest range of services. We are confident that the introduction of services on Snapdeal will bring us closer to our goal of 20 million daily transacting users by 2020.”

Earlier this year, Snapdeal had introduced recharges and bill payments and clocked more than 1 million transactions for those services within a month of launch, the e-tailer said.