Shopping festivals: Amazon offered smartphones at lower prices than Flipkart

The recently concluded big-bang online festival season saw e-commerce player Amazon nosing ahead of its nearest rivals, such as Flipkart, in offering popular smartphones at lower prices compared with the rest.

Of the 60 exclusive smartphones analysed by Ugam, a global leader in managed analytics, 17 exact models were available for purchase on both Amazon India and Flipkart. But Amazon’s products were priced lowest for 53 per cent (9 out of 17) of these exact smartphones.

The analysis also showed that half of the top exclusive smartphones by Flipkart were also available on Amazon platform. These include Lenovo K3 Note, Lenovo Vibe K5 and LeEco Le 2 models.

However, models on Flipkart were priced lower than Amazon for two out of those three smartphones. But, Amazon’s offerings was priced the lowest for more than half of the exclusive smartphones available on both websites.

Amazon’s exclusives were priced lower than the models with similar specifications available on Flipkart. Out of 31 Amazon exclusives, Flipkart had 29 smartphones that were similar in specifications. Of these, 28 were available for purchase. Amazon’s exclusives were priced lower for 57 per cent (16 out of 28) of the models with similar specs available on Flipkart.

“The Indian e-commerce war is more intense than ever. Today, stellar growth is no longer enough; winning market share is key,” said Mihir Kittur co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Ugam. “Retailers should leverage online shopper-intent signals, such as search, reviews, ratings and social-media data, to informed better selection and pricing decisions and, thereby, drive a competitive edge in this ultra-competitive landscape.”

To identify the trending products, Ugam first selected all the exclusive smartphone models available on Amazon and Flipkart as of September 28, 2016. It then used Ugam’s proprietary big-data platform to collect and aggregate consumer-demand data, such as search volume, social-media signals, and online reviews and ratings, to calculate a popularity score for each product, called Shopper Intent Score.

The availability of similar products was identified by checking which smartphones on a competitor’s site has specifications similar to an exclusive smartphone.

These specifications include screen size, operating system, processor type, storage capacity, RAM and battery capacity. Ugam then tracked prices for matched products across Amazon and Flipkart to find which retailers’ products were priced the lowest as on October 6.

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