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Small towns top metros in e-com festival sales
Online shopping seems to have finally caught on in small towns this festival season.
Online shopping seems to have finally caught on in small towns this festival season. As compared to last Diwali, Amazon that sold over 15 million products during the sale got 65% orders from tier-II cities, with 30 times increase in orders from tier III cities and beyond.
What is even more surprising is that Amazon’s Prime membership – for faster delivery – was one of the top three selling products in small towns. “Prime sold more than any other product in Amazon’s history...,” said Amit Agarwal, country head of Amazon India.
Agarwal also said that the volumes of Udaan (to enable e-commerce in rural) were up 10 times. “These are customers who are digitally underserved, and they wanted Prime memberships,” he said. Orders placed on smartphones touched 80% as many shopped online for the first time.
Flipkart, too, sold products across price points, segments and sizes in smaller towns and cities. “We have not seen this before…. We gave no-cost EMIs and easy exchanges to increase affordability,” said Binny Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Flipkart.
In recent days, Flipkart’s sales touched Rs 1,400 crore. Bansal, who had anticipated the growth, said if orders were not made in smaller towns and villages, sales would have been down to Rs 1,000 crore. “We expanded our reach in these towns and villages before the sale season,” he said.
Snapdeal witnessed 20 times increase in traffic from tier-II and III towns such as Kohima, Bellary, Chitoor and from various cities in the North East. A large number of people in these towns bought kitchen appliances, diagnostic devices, ethnic wear, etc.
“We noticed that a large number of women shoppers were from smaller towns. Nearly 30% of our new users here have purchased sarees, while 70% orders of lingerie came from small towns,” said Tony Navin, senior vice-president, partnerships and strategic initiatives at Snapdeal.
For ShopClues, small towns’ contribution was 60%.
