Woes of GST and demonetisation might have been the biggest concerns of online sellers, but that has not deterred them from becoming “millionaires” during the recently concluded festival sales.

India’s largest home-grown online company Flipkart claims that about 3,000 sellers on it’s platform clocked ₹10 lakh in sales in just five days of the sale.

It expects this number to triple by the end of this festival season.

Nishant Gupta, Director, Marketplace, Flipkart, told BusinessLine that even though the country witnessed two major reforms — demonetisation and GST — there has been no slow down in the overall economic sentiment and that the festival sale picked up a good momentum.

He added that the sellers were quite proactive towards the implementation of GST and that Flipkart had also taken enough initiatives in August to educate and engage with the sellers to help them with their GST-related issues.

“From the sellers’ perspective, the start of the festival season has been a good one. On an average, the sellers on our platform witnessed a 2x growth, but a few also had 10x growth and there were about 3,000 new millionaires. Also, the overall baseline (revenues) for many sellers has seen a major shift,” Gupta said. He added that the company had done an internal survey with the accounts managers on the seller platform and found out that 70 per cent of the sellers’ sales, came from Flipkart. Flipkart, along with rival Amazon, had kicked off the festival season with their respective annual sale events. While for Flipkart it was the Big Billion Days, Amazon had its Great Indian Shopping Festival.

According to online retail consulting firm RedSeer Consulting, e-tailers generated their highest ever sale performance over the five days from September 20 to 24. It said the e-tailers clocked about ₹9,000 crore of sales in just five days compared with ₹6,700 crore in the same period last year.

This, the consulting firm said, was due to sharp advertising, robust offers and flawless execution. E-tailers have managed to largely match their pre-sales expectations and deliver the biggest sale period for the e-tailing industry, the firm said, adding that Flipkart led the pack with the highest sales.

Gupta said the company has, for the past one year, been focussing on improving its sales by improving the performance of sellers. For this, the company had started several initiatives such as CareTouch and Smart Fulfilment to address various challenges related to inventory stocking, returns, delivery, supply management and pricing, amongst others.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW