Google discontinues Great Online Shopping Festival

Thriving flash sales on domestic e-commerce marketplaces such as Flipkart and Snapdeal have prompted Google to stop hosting its annual flagship shopping event, Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF) from this year on.

The online shopping fest, which was launched in 2012 on the lines of Cyber Monday or Black Friday in the US or China’s Singles Day, was an India-centric event to get more consumers to shop online and provide visibility to several e-commerce sites.

Announcing it on a blog, Google India’s Industry Director – eCommerce, Local & Classified, Nitin Bawankule, said that, “Today, India has many flourishing and successful e-commerce companies and there are multiple deal days being hosted by various e-commerce players delivering great value to shoppers across India.

“Users don’t have to wait for 12 months to get the best deals online, small and medium businesses no longer have to wait for www.gosf.in to find customers from all across India. Success of new categories introduced in GOSF like Real Estate and Auto have today become a norm, and both industries have embraced Internet to sell directly customers.” However, Bawankule also said that Google will continue to invest in more such India-specific initiatives. 

Ashish Jhalani, founder of consultancy firm eTailing India, said: “It is an obvious step in my mind as there are just too many individual sale days being launched. GOSF's long-term success in my opinion depended on the larger players being involved but they all have their own days.”

GOSF was the first to start an online shopping festival in India before Flipkart launched its much-talked about Big Billion Day but was marred by technical glitches.

BusinessLine spoke to a few players who, requesting anonymity, said that they have had a bad experience with GOSF as Google reportedly did not provide any technical assistance on how to list products and that their servers were slow.

GOSF’s event last year was so successful that Google had to extend it for a day and the company had to extend it for a day. Last year’s shopping fest witnessed participation from over 200 hundred big and small retailers including offline players and real estate companies.

Many of the online players said that they have had 10X growth in just 24 hours as against any average day. This, they said, was due to lot of campaign by both Google and the players themselves besides growing popularity of e-commerce in India.

GOSF’s first edition witnessed over a million people visiting the site and the second edition had over 3.2 million people, of which a majority of them are likely to be the first time online shoppers. GOSF was started as a concept to bring all the online players under one common platform and help them in getting more visibility as well as sales.

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