Flipkart emerges as winner in mega sale battle against Amazon

After Flipkart and rival Amazon made early claims to emerge as the winner in the last week sale season, verdict is out today. Flipkart has been able to clinch the top position, generating gross sales of more than Rs 5,000 crore, according to a Mint report.

The report added that the rival Amazon India has generated gross sales of Rs2,500-2,700 crore in its four-day Great Indian Festival sale last week.

Though both the companies have disputed the numbers yet they refrained from sharing figures officially.

Flipkart also disputed the numbers cited above and said its sales were higher, without specifying the exact number.

“This year’s Big Billion Days, we have set new standards by doubling our sales versus last year, stepping up our geographic coverage and vastly increasing the reach of affordability constructs. We believe, that our market share during the BBD event will be more than 70% of the online market,” a Flipkart spokesperson reiterated in a statement.

In its five-day Big Billion Days sale that ended on Sunday, Flipkart witnessed booming sales of Apple Inc.’s iPhones, Xiaomi phones and VU televisions.

Flipkart’s numbers include sales at Myntra and Jabong, its specialty online fashion retail businesses.

Amazon also said it is consistently well ahead of Flipkart on metrics such as app downloads, desktop visits and mobile website visits.

According to Amazon, its methodology of calculating gross sales could be different from Flipkart’s. Gross sales refers to the value of goods sold on a platform, not net revenue.

It boasted of winning new customers through the sales. More than 85 percent of new customers came from small towns and cities.

“We are especially excited about growing e-commerce in India with more than 85 percent of new customers from small towns,” said Manish Tiwary, Vice President of Category Management, Amazon said earlier.

It also said the highest selling product was ‘Prime membership’ which saw a four-fold jump in sales since the last Diwali.

Last year, Flipkart had claimed to clinch the first spot with sale of 15.5 million units. Whereas Amazon was just short of rival Flipkart with 15 million orders.

“After the 40% year-over-year increase at the start of the festive period last week, it looks like e-commerce will grow by 25-30% this year. That’s a healthy growth compared with the poor performance last year and the first half of 2017,” said Anil Kumar, founder of RedSeer.