)
Snapdeal claims the sale will be different from daily or monthly sales because the company has been planning for it for the last two-and-a-half months and has stocked up inventory in its warehouses.
“We want to provide a platform where consumers can upgrade their devices,” said Tony Navin, senior vice-president, electronics and home, Snapdeal. Navin added the company’s 40 warehouses were filled with products and the company had started pre-packing goods in anticipation of huge demand.
It is also experimenting with same-day delivery, within three hours, in large cities to surprise customers. Electronics is the largest category for Snapdeal and for almost all major ecommerce companies and is continuing to grow at a very fast rate. Navin said that Snapdeal is registering a 30 per cent month-on-month growth for smartphones and is seeing the large appliances category within electronics growing at a faster pace. Earlier, the supply chain was not ready for large appliance since they require a lot of technical capability. However, with that issue sorted, the share of larger appliances is also growing, said Navin. Of the total revenue from the electronics category, 40% is contributed by smartphones.
But, over time, the company expects the share to go down, as large appliances gain in popularity and since their ticket size is also much bigger than that of smartphones. For Snapdeal, the overall electronics category grew by 450 per cent in the last financial year while large appliances registered a growth rate of 600 per cent. "We expect the same growth rate this year as well," said Navin.
Meanwhile, the company is trying to avoid a situation where stocks get wiped out within the first few hours of the sale by trying to forecast demand. "We have put in 2-3 months of planning to make sure the warehouses are filled with products. We have also informed sellers to keep some buffer stock which can be shipped to our warehouses if the inventory goes down below the safety stock limit," he said. But, it is difficult to predict perfectly in ecommerce, he admitted.
