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The battle between Flipkart and Amazon has taken a new turn with the former claiming that its sales have grown multiple times at a time when the latter was running its Great Indian sale.
Homegrown e-commerce giant Flipkart has witnessed about 9 times growth in some of its categories last week and has attributed it to the Amazon India’s Great Indian sale that ran from October 17 to 20.
The Bengaluru-based company said that Amazon’s second sale last week helped Flipkart register growth in key categories such as large electronics appliances and white goods compared to any other normal day.
Smrithi Ravichandran, Director of category design and management, Flipkart, told BusinessLine , “After Big Billion Day (Flipkart’s online sale) we have started seeing a spike in base line by 30 per cent. However, last week was phenomenal with 9x growth and this was achieved without any advertising or marketing effort as millions of customers naturally gravitated towards Flipkart during Amazon's sale period.”
Amazon did not comment on the claims made by Flipkart.
Ravichandran said that even though Flipkart was not running any sale during that period (17 to 20), the company saw thousands of customers coming to the site “attracted by great customer experience and innovative features like product exchange and No Cost EMI”.
New customersShe added that the growth was also partly due to the after effects of BBD, which is Flipkart’s flagship annual sale event that started in 2014.While Flipkart claims that it has added about 1.5 million new customers during the BBD, Amazon has not given out numbers for new customers.
According to third party reports, Flipkart and Amazon had been neck-to-neck in terms of competition. However, Flipkart said it sold 15.5 million units during its five-day Big Billion Day sale against the 15 million units by Amazon.
The CEOs of both the companies took potshots at each other during the recent sale season.
Responding to a comment from Binny Bansal that the rivals are busy selling small ticket value items like “churan and hing” to boost sales, Amazon’s India chief Amit Agarwal said that the company was proud that customers are shopping for “ hing and churan” along with other big-ticket items online.
Meanwhile, both Flipkart and Amazon are planning another sale in run-up to Diwali and Dhanteras.
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