It is that time of the year when Indian consumers rush to retail markets - both offline and online - to make their last minute Christmas purchases. Amazon and Flipkart have held mega sales every year to coincide with this period of high demand, new launches, and large volumes.
On September 23, Flipkart's annual Big Billion Days sales and Amazon's competing The Great Indian Festival kicked off. Even homegrown Meesho, which is fast becoming a challenger to the Flipkart-Amazon duopoly, launched its Mega Blockbuster Sale around the same time.
All three e-commerce apps have topped Google Play India charts after less than three days into the festive sales. They have surpassed communication and social apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, which are the most popular in Indian app stores. While Flipkart, Meesho, and Amazon occupied the top three positions on Google Play, Flipkart-owned Shopsy, which is targeted at Bharat users, ranked No. Myntra, a fashion commerce app, grabbed the 10th spot. Another Flipkart Group app, PhonePe, was ranked at No. Google Play s real-time ranking lists apps based on current downloads and engagement and not on lifetime downloads and app visits. Even on the Apple App Store, Flipkart and Amazon were placed third and sixth in the third and sixth positions respectively. SimilarWeb data shows that Amazon.in had 339.2 million visits in August 2022 compared to Flipkart's 199.5 million visits in the same period, despite the fact that app-specific data for new downloads in the month of September is not yet available.
Amazon recorded its largest day of Prime sign-ups in the first 36 hours of the ongoing festive sale, which is 1.9 X higher than last year. More than 10 lakh unique products were sold on the platform, and 68 per cent came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
Manish Tiwary, VP Country Manager, India Consumer Business, said it was encouraging to see small and medium businesses, startups, artisans, women entrepreneurs offer a wide range of products to our customers across India. We are humbled by the increase in new Prime member sign-ups and customers shopping across categories. The first day of BBD sales, Flipkart claimed 1.6 million users per second. The Walmart-owned company said that festive demand is significantly higher than in 2021, despite the fact that there isn't sharing sales figures.
On the first day of sale, SoftBank backed Meesho saw record orders of 87.6 lakh million, an 80 per cent growth over last year, with small business participation rising 360 per cent. More than 85 per cent of orders placed on day one were attributed to the cities of Tier 2, 3 and 4.
Utkrishta Kumar, CXO Business at Meesho, said The Mega Blockbuster Sale has started on a high trajectory with a very strong response on day one. This performance is a reflection of the unmatched value that sellers and consumers get on our platform, and a confirmation of our relentless efforts to democratize internet commerce. Across platforms, categories such as smartphones, laptops, large appliances, fashion, furniture, etc., are used. The maximum demand was witnessed. Much of the sales volumes were driven by attractive buy-now pay-later BNPL offers and EMI options facilitated by partner banks.
1 out of 4 purchases on Amazon.in were made on EMI, 2 out of 3 products were sold on No Cost EMIs. Amazon Pay Later registrations increased by 4 X in 36 hours, according to the Seattle-based ecom giant.