Flipkart India, the e-commerce large owned by Walmart, is utilizing social movies and livestreams to transform younger customers spending lots of time on their smartphones into loyal prospects.
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 videos to boost 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 users — 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 purchasing within the first half of 2025, up from 75 million a 12 months in the past, knowledge from the retailer confirmed.
“Customers favor to look at a video and decide” when purchasing, making video commerce the plain route to take, Agrahari mentioned. Two in three Gen-Z customers now favor this format of purchasing, 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 the whole lot from sunscreen to devices. It additionally options livestreams to reply consumers’ questions on merchandise in real-time and let customers work together with influencers.
Flipkart’s foray into this section, 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 gadgets by way of dwell movies, hiring influencers to hawk the whole lot from lipstick to protein powders.
Video-led purchasing is at the moment driving gross sales in style, magnificence, private care and residential decor classes, Agrahari mentioned, including that the following 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 enhancing expertise to its video creators, Agrahari mentioned.
Person engagement numbers for day by day livestreaming present the technique is paying off. The quantity is up 17 occasions in comparison with the earlier 12 months, based on 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 exams” work for livestreams and viewers need to see extra, she mentioned. “We do not thoughts dropping a cell phone simply to show that it’s robust sufficient.”
© 2025 Bloomberg LP
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