Flipkart, a leading e-commerce Indian portal, experienced the fastest growth in the beauty and personal care (BPC) and the FMCG segment in 2022. Home-grown brands witnessed a threefold growth within this category.
BPC is a new growing segment for Flipkart with many first-time users. Presently, India has 10% penetration in these segments versus US at 50% and China at 60%. According to Kanchan Mishra, Senior Director, Consumables (FMCG), Home and General Merchandise at Flipkart, the BPC segment is witnessing an increase in the transaction of customers. In fact, there is a 1.5 times growth seen from tier 2 plus customers in the BPC categories. Kanchan added that about 50-60% of its clientele is from tier-2 plus cities as they do not have access to brands offline. She foresees enormous growth from this segment.
Flipkart is using immersive technology like skin analyser tech to attract more customers. They also have Virtual try on and other new techniques like live content commerce. In fact, Flipkart recently launched Flipverse, which is a 3.0-based version of Metaverse. This virtual mall saw customers from over 1,500 cities spending more than 20,000 hours in the Flipverse.
Another trend that is visible in the BPC space is that customers are looking for organic ingredients and clean beauty products as young customers are more conscious about clean products and sustainability. Over 40 brands have joined hands with Flipkart in this regard and more than 60% customers are ready to pay more for such products.
According to Kanchan, there is immense opportunity for e-commerce portals as the products are reasonable here because of zero distribution and marketing costs of newer products. Flipkart aims to leverage this opportunity in the future.
