Role reversal at Flipkart

BENGALURU: The top level of the country's largest online retailer Flipkart has been shuffled. In order to improve its seller ecosystem,  Flipkart has rejigged top-level roles in its core marketplace business. Samardeep Subandh, has taken over as head of categories, he was the marketing head in December last year.

Subandh will now be reporting to Flipkart's CEO Binny Bansal and is expected to help drive up sales for multiple categories, especially mobiles and appliances. These categories are a major growth area for the e-tailer so as to face the tough competition from rival Amazon.

Subandh comes with over a decade of experience in marketing and sales with FMCG giants such as HUL and Marico. In the light of these new roles, Amit Bansal, head of large appliances; Rishi Vasudev, head of fashion retail; and Adarsh Menon, who leads electronics and automobiles, will now report to Subandh.  

Furthermore, former MobileStore COO Ajay Veer Yadav has joined Flipkart as VP of mobiles category. Recently, Motorola's Moto G series, which is one of the most popular handsets in the country, joined hands with Amazon for an exclusive sales deal, after having been on the Flipkart platform till recently.

On the other hand, Anil Goteti, who was heading the mobiles category at the e-tailer, will now head the marketplace platform to focus on improving seller experience, enhancing sellers' reach and strengthening the overall merchant ecosystem. While, Goteti is replacing Manish Maheshwari, who left the online commerce major to join Web 18 as CEO in April this year.

Currently, Flipkart has about 85,000 sellers on its platform now, while Amazon has been making speedy progress with a 250% jump in sellers' base in 2015 over the previous year.

Goteti is a known figure at Flipkart, he has been steering categories like books, home, furniture and business analytics for the company.  Now as the head of a marketplace, he will report to Binny.

The latest set of developments come after a few months of a major management reshuffle at Flipkart  lately. It all began with Sachin Bansal moving to the role of chairman, making way for Binny to take over as CEO.  Myntra's co-founder and former commerce platform head at Flipkart, Mukesh Bansal had left with Ankit Nagori, who was the chief business officer at Flipkart. Punit Soni, chief product officer of Flipkart also followed these footsteps and resigned after restructuring.