Clash of the Titans - Big Billion Days vs Great Indian Shopping Festival

Flipkart & Amazon are the largest online marketplaces in India. They have been pioneering the growth of e-commerce in India and one of the main levers has been – High discount sales periods that are branded as Big Billion days for Flipkart (and its group companies) & Great Indian Shopping festival for Amazon. This year, the Sales period started on 21st September 2022 with both these marketplaces aggressively promoting the Sales period with high decibel multichannel campaigns communicating the many benefits – discounts, new launches, exclusive launches, Make in India products amongst others.

The festive Sales Periods were eventful and pleasant surprises for both of these marketplaces. There were many news and PR stories with both companies claiming higher growth (2x or 3x) vs. last year, New users from Tier 2 and 3, and higher order values.  

To clear up any doubts about who performed better during the festive sales season we reviewed Vumonic Datalabs email receipt data for the month of September 2022.

Taking Flipkart first – The most important objective for any large Sales Period is to drive order volume growth. Comparing average order volume for the preceding six months vs Sept 2022 – Flipkart drove 2x order volume growth! And in a similar vein average, GMV for the preceding six months vs Sept 2022 – Flipkart drove 3x GMV growth! 

Next, we evaluated day-wise performance – comparing order volume for the first 20 days vs the sales period (next 10 days) – Flipkart drove 3.2x order volume growth! And in a similar vein, the Average Order Value (AOV) for the first 20 days vs the sales period (next 10 days) – Flipkart drove 2.7x AOV growth!

Now for Amazon – Comparing average order volume for the preceding six months vs Sept 2022 – Amazon drove 1.3x order volume growth! And in a similar vein average GMV for the preceding six months vs Sept 2022 – Amazon drove 1.7x GMV growth! 

Next, we evaluated day-wise performance – comparing order volume for the first 20 days vs the sales period (next 10 days) – Amazon drove 2.3x order volume growth! And in a similar vein the Average Order Value (AOV) for the first 20 days vs the sales period (next 10 days) – Amazon drove 2x AOV growth!

Thus if we consider only the growth metrics vs. the previous six months and nonsale days within September – Flipkart is the clear winner! 

In our next blog, we will review if there is any silver lining for Amazon for this amazing festival bonanza.

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Written by: Anupam Asthana

Date:  19 Oct 2022

Vumonic Datalabs is a global consumer intelligence platform. We provide high-quality, deterministically linked, large structured data that can be used to derive deep consumer,  business, and market insights. Our proprietary data pipelines deliver unbiased actual transaction data collected in a privacy secure manner via large global panels.

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