E-commerce sites showered discounts up to 80 per cent
During Diwali shopping, 39% people said that Flipkart was their first preference: survey
Chennai: It was the Cyber Monday of Indian e-commerce. Flooded with crazy deals across their portals, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon created a kind of retail frenzy that saw their sites come crashing down owing to heavy traffic. Indian online shopoholics had a field day witnessing discounts up to 80 per cent on a range of products including mobiles, televisions, mobile accessories, clothing and a host of consumer durables.
While Flipkart had announced its Big Billion Day sale, with an aim to do business of more than one billion on October 6, Snapdeal ran a discount campaign with a tagline saying, “For others, it’s a big day; For us, today is no different.” Amazon, on the other hand, has been running its Mission to Mars weekend sale since October 4.
“Our teams and sellers worked days and nights to make this sale a success — and our efforts paid off. We got a billion hits on our site today and achieved our 24 hour sales target of $100 million in GMV in just 10 hours,” said Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. Mac Book Pro, HP Laptops, Samsung & Apple smart phones, Canon and Nikkon Digital Cameras and clothing and footwear were the hot products of the D-day.
“Early trends indicate a 15x growth in traffic,” said Sandeep Komar-avelly, senior vice-president of the firm. “Apparel, electronics and home appliances grew at over 200 per cent compared to the average for the last 30 days,” he added.Though Flipkart had handled such flash sales on earlier occasions when it sold Xiaomi phone devices in early August, it was struggling to handle the traffic rush on its big day.
Avid shoppers who logged on early morning were mostly greeted with “out of stock”, “404 error” and frequent website crashing messages owing to a big rush. Addressing the issue, Flipkart founders said, “Our technology team has been dedicated towards addressing errors and providing constant support to accommodate the largest scale of traffic and customer visits that an e-commerce site has witnes-sed in India.”
Kunal Bahl, co-founder and CEO Snapdeal.com said, “We witnessed sales of over a crore rupees a minute, with lakhs of products being sold in a single day. We were trending throughout the day on Twitter and the app stores, receiving positive feedback.”However, he added that the real heroes of the day were the merchants selling on our platform, who worked very hard and leveraged the surge in traffic to their benefit.
Meanwhile, a section of the social media was abuzz questioning the authenticity of flash sales citing reports about e-commerce sites jacking up prices a day ahead of such offers.
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