Snapdeal floats Snapdeal Motors

The exclusive automobile platform, is a one-stop shop to facilitate customers to make their choice while automobile shopping.

Online marketplace Snapdeal has on November 4, unveiled an exclusive automobile platform called Snapdeal Motors that offers its customers an integrated buying experience. Snapdeal Motors will enable online booking along with loan approvals within two minutes of vehicle purchase. Customers can also browse through a variety of automobile variants, avail of test drives, book online, choose from a host of easy financing options and get documentation support.

As part of the launch, Hero MotoCorp and Piaggio are available on this platform currently, while automobiles from Mahindra, Suzuki Motorcycles and Datsun will be available soon.

The platform has been designed to facilitate easy catalogue exploration and discoverability of products from the listed brands. As part of the procedure, once customers have selected their preferred automobile model, they can choose dealers on the basis of proximity and estimated delivery date. In addition to this, customers will need to pay a nominal booking amount on Snapdeal Motors following which they will have access to attractive financing options as well. Snapdeal Motors will also provide a 'Test Drive at Home' and 'Door Step Delivery' option for customers in the coming weeks.

Speaking about the dedicated platform, Tony Navin, senior vice-president, partnerships and strategic initiatives, Snapdeal, says, "Snapdeal was the first online marketplace to introduce the Automobile category and we have sold over 3,00,000 bikes sold since the launch following our successful partnership with Hero MotoCorp and others. With the introduction of Snapdeal Motors, we aim to take this to the next level and provide our customers a holistic buying experience marrying online and offline retail channels."

Navin considers Snapdeal Motors to be a very strong platform and believes to make over $2 billion in sales over the next two years.

According to Chandrasekaran, chief product officer, Snapdeal, Snapdeal Motors is available on the company's web, mobile and app platforms. "Our key challenge is to offer a consistent experience across categories while bringing the best content to make decisions in context. With Snapdeal Motors, we bring together the benefits of e-commerce including convenience and deep assortment. With industry specific content and features including auto loans and exclusive auto partnerships, we will move the needle on how e-commerce impacts our users' lives," he further adds.

In February 2010, Kunal Bahl along with Rohit Bansal, started Snapdeal.com, which claims to be India's largest online marketplace, with the widest assortment of 15 million+ products across 500+ diverse categories from thousands of regional, national, and international brands and retailers.