Amazon claims 3 times bigger sales during Diwali season, says better than Flipkart

Amazon India has claimed that it got the best response from consumers during the Diwali season sales. It said that the total sales in October were almost 3 times (2.7) more than the number of things sold during the same festive month in 2015.

By: FE Online | Published: November 1, 2016 4:43 PM

Amazon India has claimed that it got the best response from consumers during the Diwali season sales. It said that the total sales in October were almost 3 times (2.7) more than the number of things sold during the same festive month in 2015. This result goes on to show how the big investments made by Amazon in the country are paying off well. However Amazon India did not provide a data comparison of sales figures of the same month in both the years, and there is a reason for that. Last year, Diwali was on November 11, which is almost the middle of the month. So, a comparison of October data will not paint a correct picture and will rather exaggerate the growth percentage. When it comes to desktop and mobile visits, Amazon said that during the Dussera sales which lasted for five days in early October, it was consistently ahead of Flipkart. According to Amazon, the consumer desktop visits were 1122 percent more than that of Flipkart. Though the data varied on a day-to-day basis. It said that the mobile site visits were 40 percent to 58 percent more than that of Flipkart, according to SimilarWeb, a web analytics firm. Amazon app download was also 16-72 percent more than Flipkart, according to App Annie, a platform which tracks apps.

Nevertheless, Flipkart has a larger number of apps already downloaded. and since a large percent of purchase happens on apps, Flipkart might have seen larger sales figures, even though Amazon is not far behind.Amazon crossed the 5 crore mark of app downloads on Google Play Store in the last month, while Flipkart’s downloaded app numbers around 8 crores. After the festive sales got over, Amazon said it sold around 15 million items while Flipkart claimed to have sold a little bigger 15.5 crore units. Indicating that a lot of consumers are sticking to Amazon, it pointed out the number of items sold through Amazon Prime. A third of the total number of shipments in the first week of last month was through Prime, Amazon claimed. An annual membership fee for Prime is Rs 499 which gives users an unlimited amount of next day free delivery.

The biggest growth was seen in the area of household consumables which grew at more than 7 percent. It was followed by grocery, furniture, luxury products and jewellery. Amazon received orders from all corners of India; 97 percent of all serviceable pin codes. Amazon India country head Amit Agarwal told Economic Times, “We have already committed at least $5 billion (to the India business) and that’s just the beginning. This is very early for e-commerce in India.”

(Source – http://www.financialexpress.com/industry/compan...)