Online retail platforms clocked ₹40,000 crore during the recently concluded festive season sale, registering a robust 27% year-on-year growth, according to a report by Redseer Strategy Consultants.
Walmart-owned Flipkart Group continues to maintain its leadership position with 62% market share in GMV in the first week of the festive sale, says Sanjay Kothari, associate partner, Redseer Strategy Consultants.
US e-commerce giant Amazon's market share stood at around 26% during the festive sale, while other online retailers had a 12% market share, the report shows.
Meanwhile, an Amazon spokesperson told Fortune India that online retailer cannot comment on the Redseer report. "We witnessed the highest ever start to the event in the first 48 hours, with 8X sales as compared to the average business days. This response is reflected across all categories and we have overall seen a substantial increase in visitors vs 2021," the spokesperson says adding that the seller community received significantly more orders compared to last year.
E-commerce marketplaces usually hold up to three sales leading to the festival of Diwali. The first of these sales is usually the largest and usually accounts for more than 60% of the sales during the festive period. The first week of the festive sale included events conducted by all online retail platforms between September 22 and September 30.
In terms of order volumes, Meesho, with its low average order volume and high penetration in Tier-2 cities, emerged as the second largest player capturing around 21% of the market share while Flipkart Group leads here as well, Kothari says.
Mobile phones continue to lead the market with 41% contribution in the overall gross merchandise value (GMV), the report says. "Mobile as a category continued to lead GMV share, contributing to 41% of the GMV, translating to 56k mobiles sold per hour. On the other hand, fashion contributed to 20% of GMV, which grew 48% Y-o-Y from the last festive sale," says Kothari.
In terms of transacting shoppers, the number increased by 24% year-on-year with around 65% of shoppers coming from Tier 2 cities. A whopping 75-80 million shoppers placed orders across all platforms during the festive sale. Tier 2 cities witnessed the highest year-on-year growth in online shoppers.
The report also shows that the average spend per online shopper increased marginally by 3% during the recently concluded festive week.
While the beginning of last quarter was slow on demand, Redseer saw a good uptick in consumer sentiment and consumption patterns in late August and September. This, according to the consulting firm, will further lead to demand recovery in build-up to Diwali.
Around 40-50% of the total orders were fulfilled through third-party logistics players. Though having a high share of order volume in the market, Flipkart and Amazon fulfil the majority of their orders through their own captive arms.
Typically, Amazon holds its 'Great Indian Festival' and Flipkart holds its 'Big Billion Day Sale' as the first wave of festive sale. This year, Amazon's event will last for a whole month.
