With a festive mood gripping the nation and the mad rush to the get best deal during the festival sales, customers are making the best of the discounts being offered by online retailers.
Offers like ItneKumMein from ShopClues, The Great Indian Festival from Amazon, The Big Billion Days from Flipkart and Unbox Diwali Sale from Snapdeal have already seen an enormous response.
More than two million users logged onto Snapdeal during the first hour of sale. Early trends showed a huge jump in mobiles, appliances, personal electronics and furniture items.
The sale had a trigger-happy start with nearly 700,000 concurrent users flocking to the site within the first five minutes.
In the first eight hours of the sale, nearly one lakh mobile phones were sold on Snapdeal, translating to nearly 200 phones sold per minute.
Saurabh Bansal, Vice President, Categories at Snapdeal, said: “We are very excited to see the tremendous response in the initial hours of the Diwali Unbox Sale. Users have loved the additional, instant discount on Citibank cards. Many more exciting offers are lined up over the next days of the sale.”
Amazon.in said it got a billion hits in its first 12 hours of its The Great Indian Festival.
It received more unique visitors in half-a-day than on all five days of the Diwali sale last year and sold more than 100,000 units in the first 30 minutes.
“This was also the biggest day ever in the history of large appliances, with the category exceeding a month’s sale on the first day itself,” Amazon said.
Focus on non-metros
An Assocham report has noted that products worth ₹25,000 crore will be sold this festival season.
With the increase in better infrastructure in terms of logistics, broadband and Internet-ready devices, the sales will go up not only in metros, but in Tier II and III cities as well.
The major chunk will come from these cities where internet penetration has increased in the recent past.
Google Trends shows that the search for ‘Online Shopping’ has increased in regions like Tripura, Sikkim, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the past seven days.
The sale is scheduled to continue till October 6.
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