September 19, 2014: Snapdeal is one of the popular e-commerce portals that deals with selling books, electronic items, mobiles, tablets, clothes, jewelry and sundry other products. The latest addition to the retailer’s portfolio will be cars.
Well, on Thursday Snapdeal announced that it has started accepting the pre-bookings for the new iteration of Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) SUV Scorpio. This is the first time the e-commerce portal is dealing with automobile bookings and also the first tome for such bookings to take place on a third party marketplace. This move by Snapdeal and the auto maker Mahindra & Mahindra marks a maturity milestone for the growth of the e-retail sector inIndia.
The homepage of Snapdeal that usually provides room for the small ticket merchandise including clothes, perfumes, shoes and others was listed with the silhouette of Mahindra & Mahindra’s Scorpio, a utility vehicle with a dark backdrop. Also, there was an announcement that the website is accepting bookings for the manufacturer’s mainstay SUV.
Talking about Scorpio, the lineup has been pretty successful for Mahindra & Mahindra and it is the maker’s most profitable vehicle that achieves a sales figure of 50,000 units annually. However, the utility vehicle is now facing threats from a raft of new and competitively priced vehicles from the other car makers including Renault, Ford and Nissan.
To stay ahead in the competition, M&M has come up with a new iteration of Scorpio that will be unveiled on September 25. This way, the auto maker can fill its dominance in the SUV category challenging the other vendors. Also, it appears like the partnership with Snapdeal can help Mahindra & Mahindra to push its sales volume further. The interested consumers can pre-book the new Scorpio via Snapdeal by paying an initial amount of Rs 20,000 and later make the full payment and avail the deliver of the SUV from a dealer.
So long, the auto makers have been relying on the dealers greatly to drive the sales of their vehicles. Now, the M&M and Snapdeal partnership is the first of its kind when it comes to the Indian automobile market and we can expect to see a significant increase in the market share with this move.
