Amazon India invests heavily in fashion category, eyes bigger market share

By

Maverick Martins

Published
Sep 29, 2016

Amazon India is investing heavily into its fashion category to take on rival Flipkart, which acquired fashion etailers Myntra and Jabong, to gain an upper hand in India’s ever growing fashion segment.

The investment, which is covers both technology and expansion product ranges and categories, is a response to the huge growth in India's fashion sector, prompting Amazon India to pine fo a bigger market share.

Amazon said close to 30% of its total transacting customers shop in fashion. The category grew 150% year-on-year in the first half of 2016, and is now the third biggest store on Amazon, after electronics and consumables.

Mayank Shivam, category leader of Amazon Fashion, said the company is investing a lot in technology for its fashion segment.

"We are increasing the quality of the search results, with a significant improvement in size discovery. We want to make fashion easy to discover, so as to initiate people into buying fashion online," explained Shivam.

The focus is particularly on the mobile app, given that two out of three people shopping for fashion do it on the mobile. Apparel is the second highest sold category on the app, after electronics.

Amazon Fashion contributes close to 40% of the total mobile app sessions of Amazon. Almost 55% of the fashion orders come from tier-2 cities. Shivam said this is because brands only have a few stores in the smaller cities.

Over the past six months, the Amazon India has doubled the total number of brands on the platform to 15,000.