Snapdeal adds MartMobi to arsenal as India’s mobile commerce battle intensifies

Ecommerce giant Snapdeal today announced that it has acquired Hyderabad-based mobile technology startup MartMobi for an undisclosed amount. With this acquisition, Snapdeal hopes to strengthen its position in the mobile commerce space. This move would help the company boost its mcommerce capabilities, especially for its merchant partners.

MartMobi was co-founded by Pramod Nair and Satya Krishna Ganni. It’s a mobile ecommerce platform that creates mobile and tablet interfaces as well as apps for estores and small and medium-sized businesses. It also facilitates connectivity with the customers’ existing back-end systems and is equipped with a real-time analytics engine for conversions and user engagement.

With all this focus on the mobile platform, one might wonder if Snapdeal plans on going the Myntra way and shutting down its desktop-based website in favor of an app-only approach. However, Rohit Bansal, co-founder and COO at Snapdeal, tells Tech in Asia that he has no such plans. “Snapdeal has seen robust traffic via mcommerce, with over 75 percent of orders coming through the mobile platform. At the same time, our data also shows that there are still many customers who use PCs to shop online. We do not want to force our customers to use one specific medium to shop on Snapdeal,” he says.

Snapdeal snaps up startups

Compared to its rivals, Snapdeal has always taken an aggressive stance when it comes to acquisitions. This year, the company has been involved in five acquisition deals –  online product and price comparison website Smartprix, luxury fashion estore Exclusively, payments and mobile top-up startup Freecharge, digital financial product distribution platform RupeePower, logistics firm GoJavas, and now MartMobi.

Bansal believes that Snapdeal’s platform needs to be multidimensional and inclusive, rather than monolithic in nature, for the benefit of all its stakeholders. The investments, acquisitions, and partnerships are meant to digitally facilitate its buyers and sellers, as well as strengthen its logistics capabilities.

“At the center of our ecosystem is the user account where consumers have stored their information. Layering this are the marketplaces, each serving a different consumer need – Snapdeal (products), Exclusively (luxury marketplace), and RupeePower (marketplace for loans, credit cards, and financial services) ,” he states. “Realizing that the next wave of ecommerce customers are coming from mobile, the company is making substantial investments to strengthen this arm of the business through the acquisitions of FreeCharge and MartMobi.”

Snapdeal has come a long way since its 2010 inception. It currently has more than 40 million registered users and around 150,000 sellers. It raised a whopping US$627 million last year from Japanese telecoms titan Softbank, bringing it closer to arch-rivals. Flipkart closed a billion-dollar fundraising round last year, and Amazon invested US$2 billion in its Indian store.