Festival frenzy: Customers to get deep discounts as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon slug it out

New Delhi - It is that time of the year again when e-tailers try and outdo each other to get you deep discounts across product categories and drive up their own sales exponentially in the process. Flipkart had done a memorable ‘Big Billion Day’ sale last year where despite glitches, the etailing giant had managed to create an annual property for driving up GMV and getting a hoard of first time shoppers to try buying stuff online across India’s hinterland. But rival Snapdeal had stolen a march over Flipkart by offering deep discounts coinciding with Flipkart’s big day, without making as much noise or announcing a sale at all.  Will this year see a repeat of this interesting game of one-upmanship? This year, Flipkart’s ‘Big Billion’ sale is five-day long, starting tomorrow. But Snapdeal has already begun offering deep discounts. And another rival, Amazon, is also gearing up to launch a five-day sale to coincide with the Flipkart bonanza from tomorrow. For customers, this intense rivalry between the e-tailing giants spells good news since electronics, fashion wear, home appliances, mobile phones etc can be bought during the sale period at very significant discounts. Snapdeal claimed today that as part of its ‘Preview Monday Sale’, sales revenues have increased ten times and volumes are up six times across product categories compared to usual days. These statistics have come in within a few hours of the sale starting. A source said most employees of leading etailers have been asked to stay put in the office for much of this week to ensure a smooth sales period. Meanwhile, Amazon said today it will launch the five-day ‘The Great Indian Festival Sale’ coinciding with the Flipkart event tomorrow. VP Category Management at Amazon, Samir Kumar, said he expected “millions of new customers to shop on the sale and experience Amazon.in for the first time. Of these over 60% would come Tier II and Tier III cities and towns. We also expect over 10% increase in the number of customers shopping on the Amazon mobile App and we will see a spike in the new customers shopping on the mobile. In addition, people will buy more and across categories”. Rahul Taneja, Vice President, Category Management, Snapdeal, said the etailer has been preparing for a surge in sales around Diwali for a large part of the year. “Over the last six months we have been strengthening our supply chain and are geared to handle more than 10 times volumes as compared to Diwali last year. Our technology platform is geared to handle traffic surges without any delays or glitches. During peak hours today we have seen 200,000 consumers concurrently shopping on our site without any time lag.” Flipkart upped the ante last week by announcing half a million personal invites via snail mail to customers of different parts of the country. The e-tailer said this was an attempt to establish personal connect with customers of not just metro cities but in other remote parts of the country like Buxar, Imphal, Jhumri Tilaya and Kargil. Last year’s ‘Big Billion Day’ came in for flak from many customers for stalled deliveries, tech glitches and even price discrepancies and Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal had to later to apologise to each customers. This year, obviously, not only has the etailing giant invested heavily in the back-end and delivery aspects, it is also ramping up fulfilment centres. It opened up the 17th such centre Luhari, close to Gurgaon, recently for consumer electronics and durables like TVs, washing machines, refrigerators, ACs and microwave ovens. This centre will facilitate quicker deliveries to Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh. Flipkart claims it delivers eight million shipments per month but how much will this number grow by in October remains to be seen. Amazon’s Kumar said selection offering on the site has nearly doubled from the last season and Amazon has added over 61,000 products a day thus far in 2015. “We have 250% more sellers this year and we have 3 times more fulfilment capacity,” he added.