Flipkart becomes artificial intelligence provider
An Indian e-commerce platform with majority Walmart ownership is now acting as a developer of artificial intelligence (AI)-based retail solutions.
Flipkart is launching Flipkart Commerce Cloud, which offers AI and machine learning (ML)-based retail technology solutions for international retailers, marketplaces and e-commerce platforms. The suite of out-of-the-box solutions, which Flipkart tests its own enterprise on a daily basis, includes tools for retail media, pricing, inventory management and forecasting, among others.
Flipkart Commerce Cloud currently offers three business solutions which the retailer is also using in its own enterprise. The solutions are:
Marketplace Technology Stack
This full marketplace stack has more than 40 modular “plug and play” components including catalog, personalization, merchandising and recommendations engines, order and seller management tools,and inventory and warehousing technology.
Retail Media Solution
This advertising engine places relevant, personalized ads using advanced AI/ML algorithms. The solution has been already adopted by Tier I retailers across the world.
Retail Pricing Manager
The Flipkart pricing manager solution is a cloud-based SaaS offering designed to help retailers understand competitive pricing strategies and optimize pricing to maximize margins and volumes. It helps track, compare and analyze competitor price changes in real time and uses ML models to learn price elasticity of demand from historical sales data. The pricing engine combines this data with game theory to help predict how customers will respond to each price change.
The Walmart connection
Walmart led a $1.2 billion financing round in July 2020 to obtain a 77% majority share in Flipkart.) The U.S. discounter also made a strategic joint investment with Flipkart into Indian agricultural supply chain technology platform Ninjacart in December 2021.Walmart, which itself is a retail technology innovator, began selling its own e-commerce technologies and capabilities to other retail businesses in partnership with Adobe in 2021.
"Flipkart is built on the foundation of technology and innovations that created Indian e-commerce from scratch and is today helping millions of consumers and hundreds of thousands of sellers & brands experience the benefits of online commerce.,” said Anand Lakshminarayanan, senior VP, shopping experiences & Commerce Cloud, Flipkart. “Having served Indian customers, and one of the most complex retail markets in the world, we have built and scaled technology solutions that work seamlessly beyond social and economic barriers. Flipkart Commerce Cloud is a testament for the 'Made in India' story - technology that was built for India and now available for the global retail market.
"We are confident that these scale-tested, robust solutions will help enterprises across the globe with their digital transformation in e-commerce, scale their business and deliver new customer experiences," Lakshminarayanan said.
Flipkart Commerce Cloud has active customers in North America, South America, Middle East-North Africa, Africa and Europe.