Along the lines of Alibaba's advertising service, Snapdeal unveils native ad services for merchants

With the unprecedented growth of online shopping and number of merchants on e-commerce marketplaces, Snapdeal has announced the launch of Snapdeal Ads – a platform to help sellers drive discovery of their products and increase revenue through targeted advertising tools. Developed in-house, the advertising platform will allow the seller community to reach customers through product advertisements, enabling faster discovery across web, mobile web and apps.

Snapdeal Ads features a simple self-service panel integrated into the seller platform where sellers can purchase ads and begin promotions without any prior campaign management experience.The platform provides rich campaign analytics, enabling sellers to build targeted campaigns, measure impact and return on investment on real-time basis.

Snapdeal Ads deploys native advertising formats for product ads that can be showcased across various Snapdeal properties and channels. For a majority of small and medium scale businesses, these online advertisements will be a cost-effective method to boost business through promotional campaigns.

Large sellers and brands who wish to develop more elaborate campaigns can further customise their advertising plans using a comprehensive self-serve platform.

AnandChandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal, said,

Snapdeal Ads will strengthen discovery tools on the marketplace, providing multiple touch points for customer-seller engagement. The advertising tools will help our over two-lakh-strong seller community simplify its business journey and boost overall revenues as more users discover their products.

Merchants can use Snapdeal's advertising option to target consumers based on location, buying history and user intent. Importantly, the service follows pay-per-click approach and merchants can use it by using their existing cash-on-delivery option. The service also offers reporting tool that helps merchants instantly understand what the impact of their ad spends is.

YourStory take

Shopclues and Flipkart were among the earliest to explore opportunity in native ads and the latter created an advertisements business segment led by its CEO Sachin Bansal in June this year. However, Flipkart is yet to announce the service officially. Native ads are primarily placed strategically on web to be topically relevant to the content alongside, ensuring they are not distracting and are more effective than banner or pop-up ads.

These ads promise a significant additional revenue stream from merchants selling wares on Snapdeal’s platform. Globally, Amazon and Alibaba had crossed over $ one billion in revenue from native advertising. Snapdeal, which is looking to break even and turn profitable, seems to be playing by the Alibaba and Taobao playbook.

Even before Snapdeal, Shopclues has been offering native ad service for the last two years. According to YourStory sources, the Gurgaon-based company had hit $two million revenue from native ads recently.

Now, e-commerce marketplaces are under pressure to make revenue and native ads appear to be a major source to boost their bottom line. Going forward, it would be interesting to see how native ad service fares for merchants and e-commerce marketplaces.

Snapdeal ads