Amazon witnesses biggest ever festive sale in India, says top exec

More than 80 per cent of the new customers came from smaller towns for the e-commerce giant's month-long festive sale event Great India Festival which would end on October 23

Amazon said its ongoing month-long sale ‘Great Indian Festival (AGIF) this year is turning out to be the biggest-ever event for the e-commerce firm. The event witnessed the largest-ever participation from sellers and brand partners bringing services to millions of customers across the country. 

“The Great Indian Festival is turning out very clearly to be our biggest-ever event in terms of value and units sold,” said Manish Tiwary, vice president and country manager, Amazon India. “More than 80 per cent of our new customers have come from smaller towns.”

Amazon is competing with players such as Walmart-owned Flipkart, Reliance's JioMart, Tata Group and SoftBank-funded Meesho, which were also running parallel sale events. They are eyeing a share of the $45-50 billion e-commerce market, which is expected to grow to $350 billion by 2030.

The AGIF sale which went live last month will end on October 23. Customers got access to crores of product selections from sellers including unique items from lakhs of small and medium businesses (SMBs). The company said more than 35,000 sellers saw their highest-ever single-day sales; over 650 sellers became crorepatis and 23,000 sellers became lakhpatis. Over 70 per cent of sellers across India came from Tier 2-3 towns and cities. 

Categories such as smartphones, large appliances, electronics, fashion and beauty and home products, attracted the most number of new customers.

Mobiles and accessories saw strong double-digit growth as compared to AGIF 2021 and 5 times growth when compared with business as usual.

As 5G smartphones become more affordable, the mid-range price segment saw a strong uptake here with around 80 per cent sold in sub-Rs 15,000 category. More than 10 lakh customers bought smartphones for the first time on Amazon. Customers preferred brands such as Xiaomi, Samsung, Realme, iQoo, OnePlus and Apple.

Over 1.5 million new customers shopped from Amazon Fashion and Beauty. The orders for Amazon Fresh, which offers groceries, grew by 29 per cent versus last year.

Amazon Pay Later registrations increased by 4X this festive season versus the average business day. Alexa answered over 4 crore requests during AGIF to guide customers to product searches, deals and games.

Hundreds of women entrepreneurs also participated in AGIF. About six products were sold every minute under the Amazon Saheli programme.

The firm witnessed participation from over 4.75 lakh small and medium enterprise buyers on Amazon Business. Business customers on Amazon had access to over 15 crore products with GST invoices. The firm witnessed a more than 44 per cent increase in new MSMEs who created a business account with Amazon Business during the AGIF as compared to the same event in 2021.

E-commerce firms led by Amazon and Flipkart are expected to garner sales worth $11.8 billion this festive season, according to analysts. This is comfortably more than double the pre-pandemic figure of $5 billion in 2019.

Last month, Amazon’s chief rival  Flipkart’s said it achieved a significant milestone of over 1 billion customer visits on its platform during the e-commerce firm’s 8-day-long festive sale event The Big Billion Days (TBBD). Last year’s event witnessed over 700 million such customer visits, according to the sources. They said Flipkart already has a registered customer base of over 400 million. More than 60 per cent of customers during TBBD came from Tier-2 and -3 cities demonstrating a strong adoption of e-commerce across the country.

Last month, SoftBank-backed Meesho posted its best festive sale performance during its flagship ‘Meesho Mega Blockbuster Sale’. The firm said it witnessed a 68 per cent year-on-year spike in the five-day mega sales was its biggest festive sale performance so far. Customers placed a record of about 33.4 million orders during the mega sale with nearly 60 per cent of all orders coming from tier 4+ cities.