Snapdeal beats sales volume target in ongoing festive sale

Snapdeal over achieved its internal sales targets and has already touched Rs500-600 crore in gross merchandising value

By Shrutika Verma (Last Modified: Thu, Oct 06 2016. 05 28 AM IST)

New Delhi: Online marketplace Snapdeal, which has slipped to a distant number three position in the online e-commerce market, has seen a surprise revival in sales during the ongoing festive sale, indicating that it might be too soon to write off the Gurgaon-based company.

Till late last month, the industry was anticipating the festive battle between two rich contenders Amazon and Flipkart.

Snapdeal during the last four days of the sale event over achieved its internal sales targets and has already touched Rs 500-600 crore in GMV (gross merchandising value or cost of goods sold), according to two people closely working on the sale.

Snapdeal, run by Jasper Infotech Pvt. Ltd, started its Unbox Diwali sale on 2 October and closed the first day with Rs 150 crore of sales (gross merchandising value), which was more than double of company’s internal targets, the two people mentioned above said on conditions of anonymity.

“We have over achieved our targets for the four days by about three times,” said one of the two people.

Snapdeal declined to comment on the GMV numbers, however it claims to have sold over 10 million units during the sales event.

While Snapdeal numbers are still way behind that of Amazon and Flipkart, who have both already crossed the Rs 1500 crore GMV mark; Snapdeal’s sudden rebound has definitely eaten into the market share of Amazon and Flipkart this festive season.

Snapdeal too will run another round of sale between October 18-22; Amazon and Flipkart are also expected to run two-three days of sales in the second half of the month.

Snapdeal’s recent branding overhaul acted as a major booster.

“The new campaign has been a huge success for us. Despite September being traditionally a weak month, the traffic at Snapdeal was up by nearly 25% following the release of the campaign,” the company said in response to an email query.

In September, Snapdeal unveiled a new logo and tagline, Unbox Zindagi (or Unbox Life), in a move to re-position itself in the hyper-competitive e-commerce business.

As part of the makeover, Snapdeal’s logo is now in vermello (a shade of red) instead of the old blue and red combination.

Snapdeal during the sale saw major demand come from NCR, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune followed by Chennai and Kolkata. The company also saw robust demand from Tier 2 & 3 cities including Patna, Ranchi, Indore, Madurai and Bhopal.

During day one, Snapdeal claims to have sold more than 250,000 kitchen appliances and more than 100,000 pairs of footwear. According to the company, it sold over 100,000 mobile phones in the first eight hours of the sale.

The best selling categories were mobiles, followed by computers & peripherals, appliances, fashion and home.

Snapdeal currently has more than 300,000 sellers on its platform and nearly 80% of its shipments happen through its own warehouses.

(Source – http://www.livemint.com/Companies/3AzwYiVNkrwW7...)