With this festive season’s much awaited annual online sale heading into full gear, e-commerce giants like Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal have witnessed a massive number of consumers flocking to their platforms.
According to a Times of India report, a significant proportion of the new customers are reported to have come from smaller towns like Sikkim, Tripura, and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
These towns are a potentially huge market that online retailers are eyeing to expand their business, which remained slack over the past year.
Amazon disclosed that traffic on their platform from tier II and tier III towns increased as many as 17 times compared with last year, showing how discounting has helped them attract a new set of buyers.
“We have seen a five-fold growth in new customer acquisition and 70% of them came from tier II & III towns,” Manish Tiwary, VP, category management at Amazon India, was quoted by Times of India as saying.
While Flipkart did not disclose the growth in number of shoppers from smaller towns, Shopclues claimed to have witnessed double of the business from last year with a significant rise in traffic coming from users in tier II cities.
On the other hand, Flipkart, which began its annual Big Billion Days sale on Sunday, claimed to have sold half a million units within first hour of the sale.
Amazonl, which started its annual sale on Saturday, said it registered about 100 crore hits on the first day and sold 15 lakh units in the first 12 hours.
“We have seen a three-ti me 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,” said Tiwary.
He further added that smartphones have been the biggest grosser for Amazon and the sale of television sets grew 25 times.
Flipkart claimed that the number of LED TVs sold in the first six hours of the annual sae on Sunday was higher than the total number of TV sets sold during The Big Billion Days last year.
It was earlier reported that Flipkart and Snapdeal hired over 10,000 temporary staff each in order to ramp up their delivery and logistics services to meet the expected festive demand.
