Small Town Shoppers Flocking To Amazon, Flipkart For Smartphones To Home Appliances
Flipkart and Amazon saw 60% of the customers from Tier II and beyond towns.
Small towns are driving sales in this year’s festive season as more first-time sellers and buyers go online during the pandemic.
Walmart Inc.-owned Flipkart and Amazon said 60% of their customers are from Tier II and beyond towns.
More than 5,000 small and medium merchants clocked sales of Rs 10 lakh each in the pre-festive period and the first 48 hours of Amazon’s Great Indian Festival as it received orders from 98.4% pin codes across the country, the company statement said. Flipkart, with over three lakh sellers, said the platform has clocked six days’ worth of sales in just two.
The festive season sale is the most important for e-commerce firms as the period accounts for nearly a third of their annual overall gross sales. Amazon, for the first time this year, has extended Great Indian Festival to a month against the usual period of less than a week.
The stakes are higher this year as e-commerce demand is expected to touch $7 billion in gross sales, twice of last year, Redseer had said in a report. The number of shoppers thronging websites to buy everything from apparel to electronics is expected to almost double from 28 million to about 50 million users.
According to initial trends, small and medium businesses selling on Amazon and Flipkart are seeing more demand online.
Amazon
The Great Indian Festival has so far seen 91% of new customers and 66% of the sellers from small towns as customers shopped in five Indian languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada), Manish Tiwary, vice president of Amazon India, said in a statement.
Amazon Prime, a paid membership, saw 66% of new sign-ups coming from Tier II and III cities.
Bigger brands like Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Asus, Lenovo, HP, LG, Whirlpool, Bajaj Appliances and Eureka Forbes saw their highest orders through amazon.in in the last 48 hours.
Amazon started its sale on Oct.16 for its Prime members, which opened to all customers on Oct.17.
Top sold categories on Amazon:
- Smartphones
- Large Appliances
- Consumer Electronics
Popular appliances which witnessed high traction were fully automatic top and front load washing machines, direct cool refrigerators, air conditioners, microwave ovens and dishwashers.
Electronics which saw high sales were laptops, headphones, tablets, cameras and smartwatches.
Flipkart
The e-commerce platform’s seller base rose 20% in the first two days of its Big Billion Days Sale. The sale is on from Oct. 16-21.
According to a Flipkart statement:
- More than 70 sellers clocked gross sales of more than Rs 1 crore and about 10,000 saw gross sales cross Rs 100,000.
- For Flipkart’s wholesale and cash and carry Best Price stores, tier 2 and 3 accounted for almost half of its sales.
- Demand of fashion products rose ahead of the festive season as users from 1,500 new cities logged onto flipkart.com to shop.
- Demand from tier II and tier III cities continues to increase as users have the option to shop in local languages.
- Over 9 million visitors used the vernacular interface to buy products such as mobile phones, apparel and electronics.