Big Billion sale: Flipkart says it sold 25 items per second on Day One

New Delhi: Pre-Diwali sales can make or break an etailer in India. At least, that is what one saw last year, when volumes across leading etailers Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon jumped exponentially and some etailers like Flipkart reeled under the sheer jump in volumes. [caption id=“attachment_2465198” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Sale bonanza.[/caption] This year, etailers had been investing heavily in the back-end and each launched high decibel marketing and media campaigns to attract customers during the sale, which will continue for much of this week. Through the day toady, each etailer threw around fantastic numbers about sales volumes, fast moving items etc. Discounts of upto 80 percent on some items were obviously enough to lure multitudes of buyers to their sites/apps. But since all the big daddies of etail are privately held firms, there is really no way of checking the authenticity of their claims. Snapdeal says it sold five mobile phones every second during its Electronics Monday sale yesterday whereas Flipkart says it sold a whopping 10 lakh products in the first 10 hours of its five-day Big Billion Day sale. With six million visits from across the nation, Flipkart claims 25 items were sold per second on its app. Flipkart says Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai emerged as the chart toppers in terms of visits from metro cities; Ludhiana, Lucknow and Bhopal from the non-metro cities. Mukesh Bansal, Head of Commerce Platform, Flipkart said, “Big Billion Days have started off with a bang this year. We have sold 1 million units already and expect to do a higher number by the end of today’s fashion sale….It is great to see 1.6 million app installs in the last two days.” Snapdeal says the Electronics Monday Sale has exceeded its expectation with sales revenue recording an increase of 17x by Monday evening. Rahul Taneja, Vice President, Category Management, Snapdeal said, “The tremendous support from our sellers enabled us to provide attractive deals and really solid discounts which resulted in this phenomenal response we have received today. We are well on track to reach $100 million sales on our Electronics Monday Sale.” Snapdeal says 85 percent of orders placed yesterday have been shipped out already and there were no outages on any platform – app, wap or web – due to increase in traffic. Not just etailers, even cashback and coupon sites are raking in the moolah this festival season. CashKaro.com has launched the Great Online Cashback Festival (GOCF) starting today where it promises highest cashback rates, exclusive deals from 800+ retailers. What this essentially means is shoppers get a cashback over and above the deals or discounts already available on etail sites. Founder Swati Bhargava says Cashkaro expects to drive Rs 300 crore GMV this festive season (Oct-Dec) through CashKaro.