Shopping Festivals Are Buzzing The E-commerce Calendar

Posted by Cindy Guerra on March 14th, 2020

The e-commerce calendar in India has many substantial dates and massive sales that has created a pseudo sense of festivity with unbelievable deals and rates. Initially, there were events like Diwali and Christmas that had the gravity to attract massive sales and generate quantifying business. As the business developed, the commercialization of celebratory dates like Valentine’s day, Mother’s day and Father’s day has increased, resulting in the promotion for attractive deals. These important dates are setting the narrative for the industry and its behavior, platforms like Amazon and Flipkart have created their calendar events with its grand sales that are active for a week and is making record breaking growth.

Flipkart Big Billion Day sale in India:

The Big Billion Days sale in 2019 from 29th September to 4th October offered price cuts and bank discounts on credit cards, with options like buy now and pay later. According to trak.in there was almost 50% growth in the number of new customers compared to the previous year. More than half of the shoppers were from tier two and tier three cities. The transactions via the credit card options and EMIs, pay later and cardless transactions, both increased by 70%. The Big Billion started in 2014 and it is now directly countering Amazon’s Great Indian Festival Sale. During the Big Billion sale period, the online retail market in India grew over 60% and Flipkart claimed almost 70% of that share, stated economic times.

Amazon’s Great Indian Shopping Festival:

Even though Flipkart is giving great competition, Amazon India has found its feet with The Great Indian Shopping Festival. A whopping 99.4% of postal codes placed an order during the great Indian festival sale. The fashion sales grew more than five times and smartphones showed a fifteen times growth. Almost 30% of the products were using benefits like an exchange, EMI and cash backs. Amazon is not only excelling in products but also services. More than 62% of customers who bought electronics, received delivery and installation within 36 hours. Amazon has a great advantage with its Prime membership. More than half of the prime members placed their orders within the first two days of the sale.

All the platforms saw a huge growth in sales and revenue, the exact number of transactions or overall transactional value is still unknown. According to an estimate by Redseer, the overall gross sales stand at .7 billion, which is around Rs. 24,000 crores, between September 29 to October 4, between these two platforms. This massive jump is due to 32 million shoppers buying something online between 29th September and 4th October. It is not just Amazon and Flipkart, Snapdeal also stated that their number of orders in 2019 was 52% higher than that of 2018.

We cannot get a hold of the exact figures, but we can conclude on a few points assessing the data and the information we have yet.

• Tier two and tier three cities are contributing massively to the growth rate of e-commerce in India.
• The Sale period has introduced a frenzy amongst the shoppers that capitalizes on the urgency of getting products at low rates.
• Amazon’s paid prime membership makes up for its lack in tier two and tier three reach compared to Flipkart.
• These sales are becoming more frequent, boosting the revenue and pushing sales with massive growth.