Gifts galore as Amazon, Snapdeal, Flipkart enter last leg of Diwali festival shopping race

Folk theater with tales from the epics forms a part of Diwali celebrations.

Amazon sets off a 72-hour Diwali shopping bonanza from the early hours of Monday, with special deals coming up every half an hour to keep buyers engaged. It also launched a Diwali gifts store, keeping in mind the Indian tradition of exchanging gifts in the Diwali festival season. From sarees and kurtas with a Diwali sparkle to the traditional lights and diyas (lamps) in fancy new forms, this store has gifts curated for Diwali, with a promise to deliver them anywhere in the country.

It’s manna from cyberspace for shoppers as the three leading lights of ecommerce in India – Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal – vie with one another to entice them with gifts and discounts.

Last year, Flipkart had a billion dollar funding round, followed the very next day by a two-billion-dollar cheque for Amazon India from Jeff Bezos. Then SoftBank from Japan came in with two-thirds of a billion dollars for Snapdeal to make it a three-way race.

The stakes continued to rise this year, with Flipkart rumored to have raised another US$700 million, Alibaba and Foxconn joining SoftBank to pump another US$500 million into Snapdeal, and Amazon drawing heavily from its US$2 billion India fund. Apart from building out their marketplaces, these funds are going into discounts to grab market share – and savvy, bargain-hunting Indian shoppers are lapping them up, naturally.

#BigBillionDays

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— punitsoni (@punitsoni) October 16, 2015

Flipkart’s chief product office Punit Soni was out delivering orders on the BigBillionDay.

Flipkart had a 5-day Dussehra festival sale – hashtagged #BigBillionDays – from October 13; US$300 million was the value of goods sold in that period, it reported. This was three times what it sold in the original Big Billion Day last year, which turned into a snafu-ridden fiasco. This year it managed the festival sale better by spreading it over five days, although many retailers complained of being shut out with Flipkart unable to handle their orders. But Flipkart founder Sachin Bansal turned into a delivery man for a day, posting pictures in social media to show he was going the extra mile to solve the delivery problem.

Amazon went head to head with Flipkart with a 5-day Great Indian Festival Sale to coincide with the Flipkart Big Billion Days. Amazon India reported that it had its biggest daily sales ever on those five days. Now it will try to surpass that with the Great Indian Diwali Sale from tomorrow.

Pehle App

For Flipkart, there was a deeper strategy at play in the Big Billion Days. It restricted access to the festival deals, making them available only on its mobile app. The strategy behind the app-only sale was to force consumers to download and use the app. “You win in mobile apps, you win everything,” believes Flipkart honcho Sachin Bansal.