One of the country’s most prominent E-Commerce players Flipkart has entered the home services market. The company is providing these services through Jeeves.
Jeeves, an after-sales service and installation business that was already one of the largest service providers in the Indian electronics space was acquired by Flipkart in the latter part of 2014. Currently, the company is already providing its service in cities like Bangalore and Kolkatta, and its planning to soon expand to other top-tier Indian cities.
The E-Commerce giants are also likely to include washing machine repair and other similar services in the future, thus covering the product categories available on their E-Commerce platform.
This now also means that Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap) which has been quite dominant in the home service sector for some time now, will have direct competition in the form of Flipkart. This will be interesting as Urban Company has had virtually no competition from its rival companies as they failed to gain any momentum and survive a fundraising slowdown in 2016-17. Urban Company since has become a nationwide provider of at-home services including beauty-related services. Flipkart will not join the beauty services market if sources are to be believed.
As Jeeves is employed by Flipkart to provide installation services to customers, it will also include AC servicing regardless of where it was purchased. The company hasn’t stopped here as they seem to have bigger and bigger ambitions. Recently they have started looking to acquire a minor stake in Metropolis Healthcare, an Indian multinational chain of diagnostic companies. They also launched their own health tech app in Flipkart Health+, an app that serves customers across 20,000 pin codes in India and gives them access to affordable and quality medicines.
This seems like a good strategy on Flipkart’s side to expand into more revenue-generating services.
