[fununclebob]

Flipkart recently moved away from the Amazon warehousing model to an online marketplace model and I've heard nothing but complaints from customers regarding the switch. Even their own presence in the marketplace is unable to keep up the quality of service as it scales, and all kinds of scammy retailers have set up shop now which has made it relatively more dangerous to purchase on their service now.

Time will tell if they pay that billion back.

[shankysingh]

I agree , from my personal experience, quality of their service has gone down since they moved to an online marketplace model. But from what I have heard on grapevine this was also a clever ploy to work around Indian law restrictions on FDI. This answer on quoara details it all. Please, take it with grain of salt. http://www.quora.com/Flipkart/What-could-be-the-reasons-behi...

[Pxtl]

So in other words, they tried to follow Amazon's "affiliates" business model but embraced it too hard because they didn't realize that everybody hates the affiliates and only ever buy from them on Amazon because of desperation or accident.

[barry-cotter]

Or they saw the way taobao owns online B2C commerce in China and decided they wanted the Indian equivalent.

[zhte415]

> Flipkart recently moved away from the Amazon warehousing model to an online marketplace model and I've heard nothing but complaints...

Could be worth noting Taobao here. Starting as C2C (unlike Amazon / a warehousing approach) it has largely moved to a store-based approach (B2C).

Given that Flipkart are moving towards B2C (via stores) it would be interesting to compare and contrast complements and conflicts the couple have in their respective markets.