What do Amazon & Flipkart have in store for festive sales?

The 2017 festive sales have begun with a great bang and as expected, rivals Amazon and Flipkart are ready with their best moves to win the shopping battle this year.

Here’s what the ecommerce biggies are offering and expecting this festive season.

Flipkart to focus on news users and women buyers during Big Billion

This Big Billion sale event, the Indian ecommerce leader is looking to add new buyers to its user base. Not that existing users won’t get attention, but the marketplace has special strategies in place to attract new customers.

The etailer hopes that product categories like fashion, accessories, furniture and home care products would bring in fresh batch of users, in particular women shoppers. On the other hand, existing buyers would gladly shop for smartphones, refrigerators, televisions and other large appliances, according to Flipkart.

“Last year’s Big Billion Days was a lot about tapping into your existing user base, a lot about reactivating lapsed customers. But this year’s Big Billion Days will be about a mixture of growing our repeat customers and also about growing new users in triple digit numbers. Because of the telecom players making inroads into the Tier 2-3 cities and towns, over the past few months we have seen a huge increase in the number of Tier 2-3 shoppers,” disclosedSmrithi Ravichandran, senior director at Flipkart.

The biggie wants to increase the number of women buyers on its platform. One of the reasons for this is that women spend more time shopping online compared to men shoppers, as per Flipkart’s internal data. Ravichandran shared that Flipkart is pushing selected categories and bringing big brands exclusively onto the platform to get a new set of female users during Big Billion Days.

Amazon India to offer 3-month EMI holiday

Trust Amazon to come up with unique buyer-friendly schemes. The US-based ecommerce biggie is giving away three months EMI holiday to its buyers in association with HDFC bank. Under this offer, customers can buy now and pay next year if they make the purchases using HDFC credit card. The marketplace’s main objective is to make shopping affordable during the festive season. And giving a three months break from EMI is aligned with that objective.

Speaking about this scheme, Arun Srinivasan, category leader of consumer electronics at Amazon India shared,

“For smartphones, we have invested a lot on affordability. As smartphones are slightly higher priced affordability becomes very important. This is the feature that makes the products more affordable for the customers during the sale season where the customer would be buying multiple products. The EMI holiday for 3 months will be very useful for the customers.”

Although, the offer would not be limited to smartphones.

Amazon’s huge discounts on FMCG

This would also be the first Great Indian Festival after Amazon got government’s approval to sell food directly. The etailer thinks that this would be a great opportunity to expand its market share in the online FMCG industry.

Therefore, Amazon would offer:

• 35% discount on makeup and beauty products
• 70% on baby care products
• 50% on laundry and personal care products
• 40% discount on food items

“While Amazon has first-mover advantage in the FMCG space, it wants to create an impact during the festive sales in this category since consumers would buy grocery products weekly or fortnightly and hence there’s a bigger opportunity for customer recall,” said one of the people cited above. “The repeat purchase opportunity is more since a consumer will not buy a mobile phone or apparel as frequently as FMCG and hence it is asking sellers to forsake profit margins for the sale,” a source revealed.

Flipkart’s CEO sets 70-30 lead over Amazon target

Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Flipkart’s CEO is a hard task-master. And he has communicated to his team that Flipkart should gain a 70-30 lead over arch rival Amazon this festive season.

“Our CEO (Kalyan Krishnamurthy) has told us nothing less than a 70-30 (lead over Amazon) will do,” stated Ravichandran.

All the preparations are directed towards broadening their lead, she added.

As for Amazon, the American etailer is pretty confident that this year’s Great Indian Festival would be the biggest of all.