E-commerce garners Rs 22,000 crore sales in four days of festive sales event

Chennai: E-commerce has raked in Rs 22,000 crore during the first four days of the initial festive season sales event.  

October 15- 19, the first four days of the seven-day festive sales event saw $ 3.1 billion of Rs 22,000 crore of goods sold online by brands and sellers, as per the data from RedSeer Consulting.

E-commerce players have achieved 77 per cent of the predicted sales of $4 billion or around Rs 28,000 crore for the first festive sales event. While RedSeer expects that the festive month from October 15 to November 15 will see total sales of $7 billion, Forrester has predicted the total sales to be around $6.5 billion. Of this 75 per cent of $4.8 billion sales could happen in the first seven-day event.

Going by RedSeer’s estimation of $4 billion, e-commerce would have made a growth of 48 per cent in sales during the first event from last year’s $2.7 billion to $4 billion. “Sharper sales growth against last year especially in the first three days indicates that industry is on track to reach or even surpass our forecasts of $4 billion,” said the researcher.

Some of the factors that have helped the growth are the demand growth in tier 2+ cities driven by reverse migration, digital adoption and value offers post Covid-19.

 Flipkart saw over 666 million visits with over 52 per cent of these visits recording from tier III cities and beyond. It has seen 51 per cent growth in customers from tier II+ markets in fashion. Tier III customers drove the sale of large appliances with nearly 50 per cent demand coming from these cities. Of the 35 per cent new seller base this time, around 60 per cent were from tier II and tier III towns.

 “Over 1.1 lakh sellers receiving orders, 66 per cent sellers, 91 per cent of new customers, and 66 per cent of new Prime sign-ups from small towns, shopping in five Indian languages and orders from over 98.4 per cent of India’s pin-codes in just 48 hours – it’s truly Bharat’s biggest celebration on Amazon ever,” said Manish Tiwary, Vice President, Amazon India after two days of the event.  

 As for Snapdeal, 70 per cent of the orders were received by sellers located beyond the top 5 metropolitan areas. More than 90 per cent of Snapdeal’s orders were placed from non-metro cities and 4 out of every 10 orders came from first time users.

Smartphones, large appliances, TVs, consumer electronics and fashion were some of the key categories.