Breaking Down the E-Commerce Traffic: Rise of Referrals

If you’ve been wondering where top e-commerce companies in India like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon get their traffic from, here are some answers. But first, a disclaimer: all the data comes from Similarweb, which may not be 100% accurate, but is a good indicator.

Now, how big are they in terms of monthly unique views?

If you break up this traffic into direct, referrals, search, social, email and display, the general trend here is quite obvious: referral traffic from price comparison sites and networks is quite a big deal!

What’s most interesting to note here is the rise of referral traffic. For Flipkart, referrals contribute to nearly 23% of traffic. Myntra gets over a third of its traffic from referrals. For Snapdeal, its 17.82% and for Amazon & Jabong it is 20.21% and 23.03% respectively.

What’s puzzling to us is the absence of couponing sites in referral traffic that are known to be driving a large chunk of traffic. Search includes both organic and paid searches.