Chennai: The usual online favourites apart, this time it’s raining deals on cars, homes, holiday trips, dinner buffets, online pujas, demat accounts, education courses and even amusement park tickets at the Google Online Shopping Festival (GOSF). Caught in the e-commerce frenzy, a number of unconventional retailers have signed up to be a part of this latest extravaganza with their focus on the 100-million-odd folks expected to log in.
While travel store Trip-Factory.com has come up with attractive holiday packages with up to 40 per cent discounts, Onl-ine Temple, mynew-car.in, Kotak Securities and a number of training firms have come up with special offers on puja, new cars, demat account opening and educational courses respectively for GOSF.“Online has certainly been an interesting medium accounting for 25-30 per cent of our annual bookings,” said Harjeet Singh Chaabra, chief marketing officer, Adl-abs Entertainment Ltd.
“Cross-brand promotion through GOSF is quite useful as there has been 70 per cent jump in daily traffic already,” he added.Adlabs, which runs Imagica and Aquamagica amusement parks, has announced up to 30 per cent off on its tickets to the park till March. Mobile wallet service provider Mobikwik rep-orted that e-commerce transactions via their wallet had already crossed 15,000 transactions by 12 noon on the first day of Google Online Shopping Festival.
“What started off as a ‘lead generation’ platform for real estate has now garnered enough consumer confidence to become a ‘transaction fulfillment’ channel,” said Ashish Puravankara, joint managing director (JMD), Puravankara Projects Limited, who has put a couple of projects on GOSF. Interestingly, there has been a 3X rise in promotional SMS sent by ecommerce firms to their customers. “Today 450-500 million transactional SMSes were sent than the 150-200 million messages on a normal day,” said Anik-eth Jain, chief executive officer (CEO), Solutions Infini.
