The battle between Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, and India’s top homegrown e-commerce firm Flipkart is getting intense. To woo consumers, this week, both companies conducted their flagship shopping events with lucrative deals and offers on products such as phones, laptops, TVs, fashion items and furniture.
Flipkart, which recently concluded its flagship ‘Big Shopping Days’, said the event generated four times its daily revenue and 2.5 times its daily average sale.
80-hour sale
The 80-hour sale, which started on July 16, generated sales equal to 15 non-sale days in terms of value. The firm also sold as many units as in 10 non-sale days.
About 48% of consumers shopped from the metro and tier-1 cities, while 52% of customers shopped from tier 2 and tier 3 cities.
Flipkart said the sale of top phone brands such as iPhone, Pixel and Samsung was 400% of the sales on non-sale days. It said washing machines saw 4.5 times spike in sales. The sale of footwear, clothing, accessories and other fashion essentials doubled during the sale. Also, the number of Google Home smart speakers sold during the first day of the sale was 100 times more than the quantity sold on non-sale days, according to Flipkart.
Prime Day
Walmart-backed Flipkart’s sale also coincided with Amazon’s Prime Day, an annual shopping event exclusively for Prime members. Amazon said the 36 hours during Prime Day saw members in India taking advantage of more than 200 exclusive new product offerings, thousands of deals, and video and music selections specially curated for the event.
“Extending Prime Day to 36 hours this year allowed us to further reward members with unbeatable deals,” Amit Agarwal, senior vice-president and country head, Amazon India, said in a statement.
Amazon said Prime members shopped for deals and streamed content across hundreds of cities in India, including Lucknow, Ludhiana, Jamshedpur, Thane, Kochi and Ernakulam. Customers in India purchased more than 5X as many Amazon Fire TV devices than the previous Prime Day. The firm said wireless segment grew more than 5X, offering members brands like OnePlus, Redmi, Huawei and Honor. Also, the large appliance segment grew 9X and included the selection from Bosch dishwashers and washing machines.
