The e-commerce pecking order has been changed. Meesho, a Bharat-focused online marketplace, has surpassed Amazon in festive sale order volumes this year, emerging as the second-largest player after Flipkart Group. Meesho's share of orders in the festive sales pie stood at 21 per cent, while Flipkart Group platforms led the market with a 49 per cent share.
It's interesting to see a new platform emerges in the second position in terms of order volumes, said Ujjwal Chaudhry, Partner, RedSeer Strategy Consultants. He said that Meesho fulfilled 100 per cent of its orders through third-party logistics 3 PL players because it doesn't have a captive logistics arm like Flipkart Group and Amazon.
62 per cent and 26 per cent of the gross Merchandise Volume GMV occupied the top two positions, according to Flipkart Group and Amazon. Meesho's share in GMV was expected to be lower because of its low average ticket sizes given the platform's value commerce offering. Meesho is a strong driver of growth from Tier 2 cities.
In a recent interaction with Business Today, Meesho shared that it had minted over 20,000 lakhpati sellers in its five-day sale. 60 per cent of its orders came from Tier 4 regions. Our seller registrations grew 3 x over the last year, and all categories grew exponentially, with some like fashion and kitchen utilities seeing non-linear jumps, Utkrishta Kumar, CXO Business at Meesho, told BT.
Two-thirds of shoppers from Tier 2 cities are from Tier 2 households.
The festive sales saw 75 -- 80 million online shoppers this year, up 24 per cent from a year ago. This year, tier 2 customers made up a whopping 65 per cent of shoppers. According to RedSeer estimates, the GMV of e-commerce platforms rose to $5.7 billion or Rs 40,000 crore in the period between September 22 and 30, which was 27 per cent higher than last year s festive sales. Spending per shopper went up only marginally by 3 per cent.
Mobiles led the GMV with a 41 per cent share, according to a category perspective. RedSeer revealed that more than 56,000 phones were sold every hour. Fashion was next, with a 20 per cent share of the overall GMV. Fashion was the highest-growth category this year, and emerged pretty strong. One of the reasons was that people went out more than in 2021, according to Chaudhry.
Electronics and large appliances were the other best-selling categories, growing 5.2 x over average daily sales. This will lead to demand recovery in the build-up to Diwali, according to RedSeer.