Flipkart posted Rs 2,600-2,700 crore in gross merchandise value (GMV) during its five-day Big Savings Days sale, as the fear of stepping out amid the pandemic led a wider set of first-time and dormant users to buy online, people aware of the matter said.
This is the second such sale event organised by the Walmart-owned ecommerce major in the last two months, at a time when the battle for market share in ecommerce is getting more competitive with Reliance JioMart beginning to scale its digital presence.
GMV is the overall sales made on an online marketplace, excluding discounts and returns which are an integral part of the ecommerce market.
After a gap of almost four months, ecommerce giants resumed online sales beginning June, addressing continued demand from customers for home essentials including electronics and appliances.
“On Flipkart, there was a one-and-a-half-time spike across the platform on sale days compared to pre-Covid-19 volumes,” said a person directly in the know.
Amazon, which held its flagship Prime Day event exclusively in India on August 6 and 7, is estimated to have posted around $500 million (about Rs 3,700 crore) in GMV, according to market tracker Forrester Research. Other company executives and market insiders, however, put Amazon’s Prime Days GMV at Rs 3,000-3,200 crore.
The two e-tailers combined clocked Rs 5,600-6,000 crore of GMV, led by strong demand for categories like laptops, appliances and smartphones, which have a large ticket size compared with fashion and grocery.
Amazon and Flipkart declined to comment on the overall sale numbers.
“Flipkart’s strategy is more around continued momentum every few months peaking with the October Big Billion Day, while for Amazon, Prime Days is one of the most important events globally,” said the founder of an electronics brand that sells on both platforms.
“Flipkart group is focused on providing the lakhs of sellers, artisans, entrepreneurs on its marketplace an opportunity to make their products available to customers across the length and breadth of the country … We see phenomenal growth in the number of new sellers coming to the marketplace from tier 2/3 towns,” a Flipkart spokesperson said in a statement.
In an interview with ET on Monday, Amit Agarwal, the country head at Amazon, said businesses were now increasingly looking at ecommerce as a channel for revival, as customers have realised that shopping online was the safest.
Meanwhile, analysts pointed out that most purchases were need-based, given the macroeconomic conditions that continued to be bleak. “…the base of those consumers has, however, increased,” said an analyst that ET spoke to.
This was further validated by a survey conducted by community platform LocalCircles, which asked consumers why they shopped on Amazon and Flipkart during the recent sale. As much as 43% of the respondents said they didn’t want to step out for shopping and the discounts available online were good, while another 36% said they shopped online in order to not step out of their homes.
While it’s still unclear how the Covid-19 pandemic will play out over the next two months, if similar reservations by consumers persist, ecommerce could benefit heavily during the festive period. “If the same conditions persist until October when the big festive season sales happen, we are expecting that ecommerce could have an extremely good sales season,” said Satish Meena of Forrester Research.
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