Festive sale: E-commerce players add Rs 29,000 to cart

According to RedSeer’s report, smartphones led the sale with 47% of total sales, driven by new launches and affordable models. Options like value selection, affordability schemes and fast delivery helped e-commerce players in selling smartphones worth Rs 1.5 crores every minute.

Bengaluru: According to the city-based consulting firm RedSeer, the first week of festive sale (15th-21st Oct 2020) saw a 55% year-on-year sales growth with $4.1 billion (Rs 29,000 crore) goods sold across platforms from $2.7 billion last year. RedSeer in its pre-festive sale forecasted that platforms will clock $4 billion sales this year.

“eCommerce sector has exceeded the aggressive forecasts, we had made a few weeks before the festive season week 1 started out. This points to a revival of consumption sentiment amongst Indian shoppers, where they have been shopping online in big numbers driven by massive selection, great prices and the convenience and safety of shopping from home. In many aspects this is indeed a #festivaloffirsts for Indian eCommerce which will build a strong foundation for its future growth,” said Mrigank Gutgutia, Director at RedSeer Consulting.

The key themes that majorly boosted this year’s sale include affordability, mobiles, tier II growth wave, availability of stock items which directly resulted in recovery of sales for brands and sellers- who have been strongly enabled by the online channels to drive their sales growth which was affected by the COVID impact on offline channels.

The biggest growth lever this year was the massive addition of shoppers- the total shoppers during the first week jumped from 2.8 crore last year to 5.2 crore this year, which is 85% growth year-on-year basis. The fact that 55% of these shoppers coming from tier II cities like Asansol, Ludhiana, Dhanbad, Rajkot among others indicate that online shopping is spreading its wings all over India.

Given the Tier 2+ skew of the shoppers, buyers preferred affordable price ranges this year for almost all product categories, instead of expensive items. The platforms enabled affordability this year with aggressive tie-ups through brands and financing deals, coming on the back of a bleak, pandemic-affected year, according to the report.

According to RedSeer’s report, smartphones led the sale with 47% of total festive sales, driven by new launches and affordable models. Driven by value selection, affordability schemes and fast delivery options, e-commerce players could sell smartphones worth Rs 1.5 crores every minute.

Fashion, while not as big a sales contributor as last year, showed resilience to reach 14% of the festive days sales, despite the demand for formal and festive wear still being low. Long tail categories including Home and Home Furnishings have done better due to high demand for work- from-home and study-from-home infrastructure.

With a high share of Tier 2+ shoppers coming in this time, Flipkart group emerged as overall leader during festive sales week 1 and accounted for 68% of the total Flipkart group+ Amazon sales in this period. It may be noted that these two players together account for 90% of the total online sales during this period.

(ETV Bharat Report)