46Lakh phones sold online in 2 days of festive sales

Chennai: In the first two days of the five-day festive sales across the various ecommerce platforms, sale of mobile phones touched a staggering 46 lakh.

Ahead of the sales, etailers had invested much to improve the supply chain for large appliances. The boost saw the category, in the two days, notch up sales of 6 lakh units.   

Not to be left behind, low-value fashion products too saw their volumes touch newer heights. Etailers are estimated to have sold 103 lakh units of fashion products.

Cash-back firms too are seeing huge growth in transactions. With the etailers already garnering $1.5 billion gross merchandise value, they are well on track to hit $3 billion in five days.

With discounts going up as high as 50 per cent, mobile phones accounted for over 40 per cent of all transactions on day 1, while cash-back offers grew over 2,000 per cent.

Driven by the multitude of new smartphone launches across different price points in the online channels, the mobile handset sector is witnessing high growth with Chinese brands Xiaomi, OnePlus and Honor being a huge contributor.

Mobile phones were the top selling products for Amazon. OnePlus 6 (Mirror Black, 6GB RAM, 64GB storage), Redmi 6A (Black, 2GB RAM, 16GB storage), Redmi Y2 (Black, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage), Amazon Fire TV Stick with voice remote streaming media player and Redmi 6 Pro (Black, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage) were the top products sold.

Meanwhile, Flipkart said on Thursday that it sold 30 lakh mobile phones in a day — the highest phones sold in a day globally.

Three headphones sold every two seconds of the sale so far and it is selling one laptop every minute. TVs and large appliances saw aggressive pricing and cash-back offers grew by 1,500 per cent. The demand was high from smaller cities as a lot of these products are not available in those cities.

In this category, TVs saw the highest spike in sales with up to 65 per cent discounts. Mi LED Smart TV 4A 108 cm (43), Samsung 6.2 kg fully-automatic top load washing machine, LG 260 L 4 Star frost free double door refrigerator were some of the products that were selling like hot cakes.

Given the high gross margins and up to 90 per cent discount, fashion as a category saw a special push by all websites. This resulted in over 1,000 per cent increase in orders placed via CashKaro on Day1 of the festive Sales.

US Polo Assn, men’s casual trousers, Levi’s men’s skinny fit jeans, Casio Edifice Chronograph Black Dial men’s watch were much in demand.

Flipkart scored on appliances as well. Mi LED Smart TV 4A 80 cm (32”), Mi 20000 mAh Power Bank (PLM06ZM, 2i) (White, Lithium Polymer), Samsung 253 L frost free double door 4 Star refrigerator, Samsung 6.2 kg fully automatic top load washing machine grey and Midea 1 tonne 3 star BEE rating 2018 inverter AC were sold the most.

RedSeer Consulting has estimated e-commerce to achieve $2.5 to $3 billion gross merchandise value (GMV) during the five-day festive season sales in October. The total GMV will be double that of last year’s $1.5 billion.

The industry is on track to reach $3 billion by the end of the five-day festive period as it has achieved $1.5 billion in first 2.5 days of sale.

“Festive season sales have become a landmark event for e-commerce sales. The industry acquires a lot of new customers during the event. This year the industry has seen higher participation from smaller cities and we expect the trend to continue,’ said Ujjwal Chaudhry, engagement manager, e-tailing, RedSeer.