The Hindu Business Line : Harry Potter sets online sales market on fire

THE magic of Harry Potter has transcended the barriers of the wizard world to cast a spell on the Indian e-commerce market and set the cash registers ringing.

Leading e-commerce players such as Sify.com and Fabmall have been busy over the last four days delivering JK Rowling's latest book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to thousands of muggles (non-magic people) on the Net, significantly galvanising online shopping activity in the country.

Mr K. Vaitheeswaran, COO of Fabmall.com said that sales have touched 8,000 copies. "We started the promotional campaigns about three and half months back," he added.

The orders peaked in the last three weeks, and subsequently came down to 30-40 copies per day. "However, we expect a second wave of demand sometime next week, when the readers finish the book and spread the word," he said.

The company expects to garner revenues of Rs 45-50 lakh by the month-end from sales of the book, he added.

Mr J. Gopalakrishna, Manager (Operations), Sify, said: "We have sold about 1,500 copies in all. Of this, 1,300 are pre-launch orders that have already been delivered, and about 200 are orders that have been placed since July 16 (when the book was released) and will be delivered shortly. In terms of the unit numbers, it has clearly outperformed every other online shopping item."

The company expects an average demand of 70-100 copies per day for the rest of the month.

"So far, the revenues from sales of the book have touched about Rs 9 lakh and are projected to reach almost Rs 20 lakh by the month-end."

The maximum pre-launch demand came from Chennai and Mumbai, he said.

The company ensured that the first set of copies were delivered at customer premises across Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi on July 16 itself.

`Harry Potter' was the top search keyword in the books category on eBay India in June.

"Hundreds of Harry Potter Books sold, driving 400 per cent growth in the fiction category and 120 per cent increase in the books category overall," said Mr Gautam Thakar, Director (Marketing), eBay India.

"Our top 3 booksellers (eBay is a marketplace and does not sell anything) offered `pre-booking' for over two weeks before the launch and in most cases books were delivered just a day after the launch. What is interesting is that we had very strong bidding from small towns like Raipur, Aligarh, Nagercoil, Palakkad, and Tehri Garhwal. We even had people from the UK buying from our Indian sellers."

Online shopping is expected to touch Rs 1,180 crore in 2005-06 and the books category would be prominent fast growing category in the non-travel categories, according to Ms Preeti Desai, President, Internet and Online Association.

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Harry Potter sets online sales market on fire