A Rocking Festive Season for Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon with eye on $1.5 Billion in Festive Sale

2nd October 2016 saw empty roads and vacant cafes as India’s two biggest e-commerce companies have commenced an online war to lure customers with attractive discounts and lucrative offers. Right in response to Amazon’s first-day score card of 1.5 million units sold in 12 hours — on the first day of sale on Saturday, its rival Flipkart has raised the bar on Sunday and pegging the number of units sold at 2.25 million in exactly 12 hours. This figure of Flipkart include the sales of Myntra, which Flipkart acquired some two years back.

This online war between the two biggest e-commerce companies in India is on for a complete week where each one is trying to overpower the other by using various business tactics on product sale, assortment, and discount to tell the investors that who’s the biggest in the market.

Experts and market analytics say that the top three e-commerce companies, Flipkart, Amazon, and Snapdeal, could end up with a combined sales of $1.5 billion, or Rs 10,000 crore, in this year’s festive sale week that began over the weekend.

For this, Snapdeal is playing the time strategy as they promise a delivery in 50 minutes to the customers- just a little more than what pizza takes to arrive at our home. This is the USP of this company in this festive season sale. An executive of this Kunal Bahl led company said, “We had the fastest delivery of the season at under an hour. An order for iPhone 5S placed at 7.20 am on October 2 was delivered to the buyer in Gurgaon at 8.10 am.”

It is great that in just one day of sale in this festive season if these giants could generate around $300-400 million (about Rs 2,000-3,000 crore) in orders, we can say that Amazon had kicked off the sale on Saturday followed by Flipkart and Snapdeal on Sunday.

Trade Pandits and experts are still unable to predict a clear winner as all the three have done $100 million business in sales, yet Amazon is said to have done a notch higher transactions than Flipkart. Sreedhar Prasad, partner, e-commerce and start-ups, KPMG India said, “This season has the potential to have $1-1.2 billion (Rs about 6,800-7,000 crore) worth of transaction happening predominantly due to the electronics and fashion categories.” Also, the weekend holidays saw more consumers shop online.

The Snapdeal’s Unbox Diwali Sale saw nearly 1.1 million buyers from a total of 2,800 cities and towns across the country in the first 16 hours of sale. Saurabh Bansal, vice-president, category management, Snapdeal said, “We are seeing consistent growth across all categories, with overall six-time increase in volumes as compared to usual days.”

On the other hand, Amazon claimed that their company’s sales grew fivefold on the second day as compared to the sales on the same day during last year’s Diwali sale.

As per the records, last year, the three biggie’s combined did a business of $1 billion (Rs 6,800 crore) during the same period.

Following are the highlights of what happened on Day 1 of the sale:

Flipkart:

flipkart big billion sale

  • Flipkart and Myntra altogether sold a total of 2.25 million units in the first 12 hours of Big Billion Sale.
  • Sold more Apple watches in 10 minutes than the total sale of Apple watches online and offline in a month
  • Myntra clocked 3 times more revenue in the  first hour, compared to the 2015 edition

Snapdeal:

snapdeal sale on diwali

  • During night, a total of 180 orders booked per second
  • Orders went to nearly 52,000 sellers.
  • By 4 pm, more than 1.1 million people had made purchases
  • Fastest delivery: An order for iPhone 5s  placed at 7.20 am on Oct 2 was delivered in Gurgaon at 8.10 am

Amazon: 

amazon sale on diwali

  • Managed to sell over 1.5 million units in the first 12 hours
  • Microwaves saw a 30-time spike in demand
  • Diapers and baby products also saw a rapid increase in demand
  • More than 100,000 units sold in less than the first 30 minutes
Advertisement

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here