Flipkart, Amazon & Snapdeal festive sale: Who took home big bucks?

Thankfully, the sale is over. The hysteria in people around me was mind-boggling. Shopping was being done not because of necessity or because it was festival time but because it was all discounted. That is I guess, the by-product of the e-commerce boom itself.

Forget that, the mania was all the more conspicuous with the e-tailers themselves. Fresh statistics, claims, and statements were coming every day to prove their dominance to customers and rivals alike.

And now that the sale is finally over, obviously, there has to be a winner. And to no one’s surprise, Bansal duo’s Flipkart has already proclaimed itself to be the winner with 15.5 million units sold during its five-day sale, stomping past closest rival Amazon which said it clocked sales of 15 million units on Wednesday.

The third horse in the race, Snapdeal claims a modest 11 million units. Looks like, the makeover didn’t go in vain. With the ‘Unbox Diwali Sale’, this time, the startup says, they saw a 4 times increase of new users who shopped at Snapdeal as compared to last Diwali.

Fashion, home (general merchandise) and electronics were highest selling categories by volume and besides the metros, the traffic from Tier-2/Tier-3 cities increased 20 times across the country, says the Kunal Bahl’s team.

Amazon says that its Prime subscription service was the star of the show and that the volume of sales on its platform grew three-fold to more than 15 million orders six hours before the deals ended. Three biggest categories for the company were mobile phones, fashion, and consumables.

Other highlights from Amazon’s story are re-orders from 90 percent of the PIN codes, new customers increased by five times, nearly 65 percent of the orders came from tier-2 towns, and a 30-fold increase in orders from tier-3 areas.

Getting back to the self-proclaimed winner, smartphones and televisions helped boost the value of goods sold by Flipkart to $550 million according to a Times of India report citing sources. Last Diwali, this figure stood at $300 million.

“Before the start of the festive season, Flipkart was looking to maintain its market share; Amazon was looking to take market share from Flipkart, Snapdeal, and smaller players; and Snapdeal was looking to find a place in the changing dynamics of India’s online retail market,” said Satish Meena, forecast analyst at Forrester Research. “Flipkart is now in a slightly stronger position to negotiate the next round of funding than in the past few months,” concluded he.

Analysts believe Flipkart might have stridden past Amazon during this sale period because of different targets. The average order value at Amazon is expected to be lower given its focus on consumables during the five-day sale whereas Flipkart banked big with mobiles and large appliances.