Ather, an electric two-wheeler maker, has secured an agreement with Flipkart to sell the scooter on the e-commerce site. In a LinkedIn post, Ather’s chief business officer Ravneet Phokela announced the initiative, which is now being trialled in the Delhi-NCR region.
“We’ve partnered with Flipkart to provide the Ather Energy 450X Gen 3 scooters on the Flipkart site.” We are starting with the NCR of Delhi and will shortly expand to the rest of the country. “Exciting things, and plenty more to come,” Phokela said on LinkedIn.
In a response to a platform user, Phokela stated that this is not intended to replace the company’s offline channel, and that Ather wants to extend its distribution footprint to 90 cities and 120 Experience Centres by 2023.
“We do not anticipate an uninformed buyer seeing Ather 450X on Flipkart and placing a purchase there.” They’d always go to an Experience Centre, have a test ride, get a sense of the product, and then place a purchase. Alternatively, an informed buyer may feel more at ease placing an order on Flipkart since he or she has previously gone through an offline purchasing process,” Phokela remarked.
According to Financial Express, Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal put $23 million into the electric two-wheeler startup’s Series D round of investment in 2020. Ather Energy, located in Bengaluru, was created in 2013 but did not release its first scooter until 2016. It took another three years for the business to begin producing the scooter in 2019. The business claims to have sold over 50,000 scooters since then.