Jabong's days may be numbered as Flipkart shifts focus to Myntra

Flipkart

In the absence of a definitive long-term strategy for fashion and lifestyle e-tailer Jabong, Walmart-owned Flipkart has begun redirecting users towards its Bengaluru-based fashion e-commerce portal Myntra, The Economic Times reported.

Sources told the paper that this could be the first step towards a possible shutdown of Jabong as an independent brand. “The direction for Jabong has been unclear for more than a year,” a source told ET, adding that it hardly made any strategic sense to run two websites on the front-end.

Over the past few months, Flipkart has been using its homepage to move users from the Jabong app to Myntra, incentivising the same. The company has also slashed a bulk of its marketing expenditure on Jabong. “The dilemma is that Jabong has a sticky customer base, which Myntra wants to leverage, but investing marketing dollars in both businesses is not logical,” a top executive at Myntra told ET.

ET cited data sourced from SimilarWeb (a website that provides web analytics services for businesses) to highlight the steady decline in Jabong’s web traffic, as compared to Myntra’s, during the same period. Jabong witnessed its web traffic going down from 7.5 million in January to 2.5 million in June while the web traffic on Myntra was at a flat 30 million during the same period.

The number of Jabong app downloads also crashed from a 6,87,140 in February to 1,35,812 in June, as per data from app analytics and app market data platform App Annie.

Flipkart acquired Myntra in 2014 and Jabong in 2016, both of which saw the ultimate acquisition of their parent company by American retail giant Walmart.