Here’s how Snapdeal will make it really hard for users to leave its app

Snapdeal wants to make sure you never leave its app. Photo credit: jeshoots.com

Snapdeal is getting into the lucrative online services market in India, the company said on Monday, becoming the first major ecommerce company to take the plunge.

The company said it is tying up with food delivery, transportation, and home services like Zomato, Cleartrip, redBus, and UrbanClap, to integrate them on the Snapdeal platform. This will allow consumers to access the service they need through Snapdeal’s app.

Pure-play ecommerce is turning out to be a hard nut to crack, as companies find it difficult to make profits and yet engage the deal-seeking customer. The advent of big names like Amazon and the potential entry of Alibaba and Rakuten in India is also likely to make it tougher for smaller companies to keep getting active users. Snapdeal has set a target of hitting 20 million daily transacting users by 2020.

Under the new move, Snapdeal is only going to be an aggregator of sorts, but this could potentially open up a market worth billions of dollars for online services, the company said.

It also allows a new avenue to keep users engaged in its own app, thus potentially increasing customer engagement.

Snapdeal did not reply to an email asking for details on the financials of the arrangement.

“Online services is an industry potentially worth US$100 billion by 2020 and is poised to play a huge role in driving habit commerce in India… The introduction of services on Snapdeal is a big leap forward in catering to nearly all the consumption needs of our customers,” Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal, said in a statement.

The company will also make sure users get customer support and call center numbers will be prominently mentioned in all the web view footers, ticket details, and order pages, Snapdeal said.