Following Flipkart’s Walmart deal, eBay, which is exiting Flipkart is looking at fresh bid in India and is in talks with etailers including ShopClues. Sources stated that these talks could result in eBay acquiring ShopClues.
However, eBay stated that it was planning on re-launching in India for cross-border trade play and refused to say anything about strategic options.
On its part, Flipkart has stated that it would stop using eBay and is planning to set up its own platform for revamped products. Flipkart had acquired eBay.in when it raised a round of $1.4 million from the ecommerce platform, Microsoft and Tencent, in 2017. At that time, eBay had invested $500 million in Flipkart and will leave it with $1.1 billion.
Flipkart CEO, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, in a mail to employees, stated that the company is set to stop all customer transactions with the ecommerce platform from 14th August and use a new platform for revamped goods. Sources say, in recent times, ShopClues has had talks with several ecommerce companies for a potential sale. Recently, it has raised a $10 million bridge round from exiting investors as well as new round from Singapore’s GIC.
However, ShopClues did not want to comment on speculations and co-founder Radhika Ghai dismissed speculations about ShopClues’ talks with Rakuten, the Japanese ecommerce company.
ShopClues’ has also recently acquired another $1 million dollars from its US-based parent company. It also witnessed an increase in revenues by 45 per cent to INR 275 crore in 2017-18, while the losses dropped to INR 208 crore. eBay started operations through the acquisition of News Corp-backed Bazee.com when it entered the Indian market in 2004. However, it struggled to make a mark as the market was dominated by Amazon India and Flipkart. At the time the Flipkart merger was announced, eBay India had a base of four million buyers.
A spokesperson for eBay stated that the company was planning to relaunch it in the country with a differentiated offer where they would be initially focussing on cross-border trade opportunity. The spokesperson also added that eBay believed that there was tremendous growth potential for etailers in India and there was a significant opportunity for several players to be successful in the country’s diverse market.
