Ather scooter to be available on Flipkart after companies enter partnership

Electric two-wheeler manufacturer Ather has signed a deal with Flipkart to allow customers to buy the scooter from the e-commerce platform. Ather’s chief business officer Ravneet Phokela made the announcement in a LinkedIn post and said that the program is currently being piloted in the Delhi-NCR region.
“We’ve entered into a partnership with Flipkart to launch the Ather Energy 450X Gen 3 scooters on the Flipkart platform. We are initially piloting this in Delhi NCR, and will roll out to the rest of the country soon. Exciting stuff and lots more to come,” said Phokela in the LinkedIn post.

Replying to a user on the platform, Phokela clarified that this is not meant to replace the company’s offline channel and that Ather plans to expand its dribution footprint to 90 cities and 120 Experience Centres 2023.
“We are not expecting an unaware customer to discover Ather 450X on Flipkart and place an order there. They would invariably visit an Experience Centre, take a test ride, get a feel for the product and then place an order. Alternatively, an aware customer might be comfortable placing an order on Flipkart because he/she has already been through an offline purchase journey,” added Phokela.
According to Financial Express, Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal had invested $23 million in the electric two-wheeler company’s Series D round of funding in 2020. Bengaluru-based Ather Energy was founded in 2013 but only announced its first scooter in 2016. The company took another three years before it began delivering the scooter in 2019. Since then, the company claims that it has sold over 50,000 scooters.