Mumbai: Diwali has come early for e-tailers like Amazon and Flipkart whose Great Indian Festival and Big Billion Days Sales got over recently. With the 5-day long sale fst, both Amazon and Flipkart have amassed a whopping Rs 15,000 crore.
RedSeer Consulting in its report said e-tailers had a better “sales performance over the five festive days from October 9-14”, generating about Rs 15,000 crore (around USD 2 billion) in sales. This translates into about 64 per cent year-on-year growth compared to USD 1.4 billion (around Rs 10,325 crore) generated in the 2017 edition.
“The industry witnessed a higher growth this time compared to the last year. This was driven by multiple drivers, key being a larger shopper base from tier II (and beyond) cities. Affordability and loyalty schemes introduced by e-tailing players also played a huge role in converting the visitors into shoppers,” RedSeer said.
“The event exceeded our most aggressive plans across all the categories…more than 80 per cent of the new customers came from small towns, and we received orders from 99 per cent of the serviceable pin-codes in the country in just four days,” he added.
He added that smartphone sales accounted for the largest portion in terms of value, while fashion was the biggest in terms of the units shipped.
“Fashion was also the biggest category in terms of acquiring new customers with 63 per cent orders coming from tier II and III cities… We also saw 2 out of 3 customers using schemes like exchange, EMIs and bank offers,” he explained.
Interestingly, Amazon’s Hindi Website, which was launched recently, saw 2.4 times new customers coming and shopping on the platform as compared to a non-sales day.
Arch rival Flipkart said its latest edition of the Big Billion Days sale has “smashed all the existing records to set new benchmarks for the entire Indian retail industry”