 "Google's online shopping festival creates glitch-free buzz")
None of the participating websites witnessed any technical glitches and most offers lasted through the day, instead of getting exhausted within the first few hours as happened during earlier online festival sales.
While Flipkart gave GOSF a miss this year — because the dates of the event clashed with its Big App Sale (where the company is offering discounts to buyers who make purchases through its mobile application) — about 450 brands and e-commerce companies are participating in GOSF. Going by the first day’s trends, competitors and smaller players benefited from Flipkart’s absence. Companies that benefited the most on the first day of GOSF were Amazon, Jabong, ShopClues, Snapdeal and Myntra, information generated by several data analytics firms showed.
| DAY-1 TOP TRENDS |
Source: DesiDime, CashKaro.com, Meltwater Group, Vizury |
While most of the e-commerce companies were in the process of collating data at the time of going to press, a spokesperson at Snapdeal said the company saw a 25 per cent increase in conversion rates (the percentage of visitors who make purchases against the total traffic) on Wednesday.
According to cashback and coupons website CashKaro.com, the average order value on Wednesday was also higher at Rs 3,500 against Rs 2,000 on other days. According to mobile wallet MobiKwik, within the first five hours of GOSF, it clocked 10,000 transactions on different websites. By noon, this number went up to 15,000 e-commerce transactions. Most of these transactions happened on ShopClues, followed by eBay and Snapdeal.
“We have seen 60,000 additional wallet deposits and 200,000 ‘Wallet Purchases’ for mobile recharge, TV recharge and bill payments in addition to e-commerce transactions,” said Upasana Taku, co-founder, MobiKwik.
Continuing the trend of earlier online sales in the country, mobile and electronics were the top categories of interest to buyers, followed by fashion, restaurants and travel.
Like for several earlier online sales, consumers took to social media to share their experiences on GOSF and discuss the deals that attracted them. Almost through the day, two tags related to GOSF, #72HoursOfCrazy and #GOSFWithSnapdeal, were trending on micro-blogging website Twitter.
“In the past 24 hours, there has been a massive buzz on social media on the GOSF 2014. We found that in the last 24 hours, there were more than 5,000 conversations around the three-day gala shopping festival. It is interesting to note more than 75 per cent of these conversations came from Twitter, followed by Facebook,” said Nitin Bhatia, director-agency partnerships at Meltwater Group, which specialises in online and social media analysis. “Among the plethora of companies that are participating in this festival, we saw eBay, Tata Housing and Snapdeal buzzing in most of the conversations,” he added.
The Rs 299 Corner, where products across several categories are being sold at a flat rate of Rs 299, remained a favourite of buyers. According to trends drawn by online shopping community DesiDime, based on the interactions on its portal, the merchants that appear to be doing exceedingly well include Jabong and ShopClues, mainly due to Rs 299 Corner.
Additionally, users have discussed Snapdeal five-six times more than the average conversations on the other days on DesiDime. Amazon India and PayTM are also among the top-five merchants being discussed on DesiDime.