Snapdeal grosses about ₹500 cr in annual savings from cloud service since 2016

E-commerce player Snapdeal's cloud service has paid rich dividends, booking over ₹120 crore each in annual savings since its launch in 2016, according to a senior company official.

The online marketplace had invested about ₹125 crore four years ago to set up cloud services.

The New Delhi-based firm, founded by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal in 2010, has cumulatively saved around ₹500 crore since then, making four-times the investment it made four years back, Prashant Parashar, head of technology at Sanpdeal told PTI on Monday.

Called Cirrus, the cloud service has 16 petabytes of storage and can serve as much as 11 billion customers a month, he said, adding over 85% of its 70 million monthly visitors are from small towns.

When asked why the savings are static all the years even as its userbase has been going up, its head of policy Rajnish Wahi said the main reason for this is the falling cost for servers and thus the service pricing, and that they don't see much increase in the savings going forward.

At best we can expect a 5% increase annually, he said.

Cirrus was launched in 14 languages but since then it has been scaled back due to falling demand, Wahi said.

Cirrus enables a personalised experience for each user and can today handle 11 billion page views per month, Parashar said, adding it has 70 million visitors per month of whom as much as 30 million were added in 2019 alone.

The marketplace set up in 2010 has over 5 lakh registered sellers, of whom 75,000 joined in the past 12 months.

Cirrus, launched in September 2016, enables Snapdeal to offer a personalised feed to each and every user. Using advanced data science and AI, each user gets a feed of products personalised based on their engagement and history on the platform, which changes every time they visit. This allows users to efficiently browse and discover products from over 220 million listings on Snapdeal.

At more than 1,00,000 core and 16 petabytes of storage, Cirrus is one of the largest OpenStack deployments globally and has been built to handle long term growth, the company claimed.