And so it has begun! All the marketplaces have set the ball rolling on the eagerly awaited Diwali sales. The figures are slowly coming in, and here is what the first two – three days of the sale shows.
Amazon says this year has kicked off to a great start, surpassing its figures from the Diwali sale of 2015. The company claims that the first 14 hours of this year’s sale has seen more unique visitors than all the five days of last year’s sale combined. Manish Tiwary, VP category management at Amazon India says,
“We have seen a three-time growth on day one compared with last year. The trend is that we are outpacing Saturday’s sale on Sunday which is unusual because traditionally sales are lower on day two of most sale events.”
The company also claims to have got more than a billion hits in the first half of the day, more than a lakh units sold in the first 30 minutes of the sale, and a 20-time increase in the demand for consumer electronics. Tiwary said,
“In the first 12 hours, we clocked slightly ahead of 1.5 million units of sale, which again is a number that we’ve never experienced and I would assume it’s again a record for the Indian e-commerce industry.”
Shoppers from Tier 2 and 3 cities have also gone up.
“We have seen a five-fold growth in new customer acquisition and 70% of them came from tier II & III towns,” claims Tiwary.
Sreedhar Prasad, partner, e-commerce and start-ups at KPMG India feels that electronics and fashion will be the prime money makers this season. He says,
“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.”
Snapdeal has also seen a fairly decent progress. Saurabh Bansal, vice-president, category management at the company said,
“We are seeing consistent growth across all categories, with overall six-time increase in volumes as compared to usual days.”
Furniture, mobile and home appliances are the crowd-pullers for Snapdeal. The company witnessed more than two million users logging on during the first two hours of the sale.
A RedSeer Analytics study shows that last year’s Diwali sale figure for Indian ecommerce touched $1.5 billion (October sales). It definitely looks like this year’s figure is going to be much higher, even with Sreedhar Prasad’s modest estimate!
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