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Flipkart shuts down Jabong, redirects users to fashion platform Myntra

New Delhi: Walmart-owned Flipkart has formally shut down Jabong in an attempt to focus on its premium fashion platform Myntra. As part of the move, Flipkart is going to redirect Jabong’s portal and its app to Myntra’s shopping window. In 2016, Flipkart acquired Jabong for $70 million in cash and has since then been struggling to unveil a concrete long-term plan for the fashion portal.

Earlier, reports surfaced that Flipkart had slashed its marketing spend on Jabong, and started offering incentives to users to move from the Jabong app to Myntra on its homepage.

Many industry experts are of the view that running two portals on the front-end makes little strategic sense and will aid the Bengaluru-based online retail titan to strengthen operations and make cut marketing budget.

Devangshu Dutta, founder of Third Eyesight, a strategy consulting firm, told the Economic Times: “The way ecommerce market in India has developed, customers need to be reacquired consciously. Since the level of stickiness is low, it is better to bring consumers to one site than spread money across multiple sites. Given how Walmart’s focus as a business is fairly cost and efficiency conscious, it makes sense to consolidate operations.”

In November last year, Walmart took a non-cash impairment charge of $290 million on account of it writing off its investment in Jabong. Maynyra and Jabong own 70 per cent market share in India’s apparel online retail space.

The Indian clothing market will climb to $59.3 billion in 2022, making it the sixth-largest worldwide, comparable to the United Kingdom and Germany, according to the financial daily which citied data from McKinsey’s FashionScope.

The publication, citing data from the web analytics site SimilarWeb, mentioned that Jabong downloads dipped 12.71 per cent in December 2019 alone. It also saw a drop in daily active users with December 2019 numbers down 10.61 per cent.

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