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After its Big Billion Day sale fiasco last October which disappointed thousands of online shoppers, India’s largest e-commerce company, Flipkart, is now experimenting with a new kind of sale format that is restricted to just one category at a time.
The two-day ‘Home Shopping Days’ sale held on 21-22 April offering power prices and flat discounts of 50-60 per cent was restricted to its recently launched ‘Home’ category, including furnishings, décor, tools, kitchen/dining ware, appliances, clocks and lighting. The sale elicited a better-than-expected response from shoppers across the country with a record 3X growth in traffic and 7X growth in sales during the period.
The sale attracted more mobile app traffic compared to the website—60 per cent of the traffic and 50 per cent of the merchandise sales were via the Flipkart mobile app.
This is the second such single-category sale that Flipkart has experimented with. The first one was a ‘Lifestyle’ category sale held on 13-14 February, timed to ride the shopping frenzy of the Valentine’s season. The third single-category sales for Electronics are already on, again for a two-day period, on 27-28 April.
“A one-off sale like the ‘Home Shopping Days’ exposes customers to the wide range of products that we offer within a category and also opens great offers to choose from,” said Ankit Nagori, Senior Vice-President, Marketplace, Flipkart. “The Home category is one of our fastest growing categories.” He added such an engagement will help connect with customers, gather deeper insights on customer preferences and also enable the company to develop interesting sale properties in the future.
Flipkart’s Home category sale is a tactical move to attack both specialty offline and online retailers of ‘Home’ products and go after their customers, observed Harminder Sahni, founder and Managing Director, Wazir Advisors.
The Home category sale is about Flipkart getting more category-focused. Adds Pinaki Ranjan Mishra, national head of Retail and Consumer Products Practice at EY: “The idea is to attract a wider base of consumers by establishing that they are specialty players in each of their categories with single-category sales.”
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