India's two largest e-commerce platforms Flipkart and Amazon will shortly host their annual festive sales - the Big Billion Day Sale and Great Indian Festival Sale, respectively where the companies see a big chunk of their growth for the year. With the pandemic-led adoption of online shopping by Bharat customers and some share of beleaguering organised retail shopping moving from offline to online, Consulting firm Redseer's Online Festive Forecast Report 2020 expects nearly 160 million people to shop this year during the festive sale compared to 135 million in 2019. It also expects the festive sale to grow from $2.7 billion last year to $4 billion during the first sale of this year.
"COVID enabled massive growth in new shoppers as consumers now more than ever prefer to shop in a manner that is convenient, safe and hygienic and the e-commerce space meets these requirements. Despite at least a month to go before the sales, consumers show positive sentiments to purchase during this period per our survey," the report said.
According to the firm's analysis, during the 2019 festive sales gross value of merchandise (GVMs) grew to around $2.7 billion from $2.1 billion in 2018, and the overall shoppers grew by about 1.4 times in 2019 compared to previous year, primarily driven by tier-2-plus cities. This year too with accelerated inclusion of Bharat shoppers, the firm expects that there could be a change in the category mix owing to high share of first-time shoppers as consumers shop for a broader range of categories including long tail and non-electronics owing to offline closures.
The most popular category 'fashion' is expected to continue doing well even this year owing to a relatively slow recovery rate post-lockdown and activities and social gatherings increasing along with aggressive discounts from platforms. "Mobiles and appliances to remain strong but not as large as previous years as demand for these verticals has been somewhat satiated with category specific sales post lockdown," the report said. Both Flipkart as well as Amazon have already announced creating over 70,000 seasonal jobs in the festive season by each of them across their supply chains.