Tag: flipkart stories

The Indian E-Commerce Showdown: Unveiling the Price War Between Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival
India’s homegrown eCommerce giant Flipkart, now backed by Walmart, reported a record 1.4 Billion customer visits during the early access phase and throughout the seven days of its premier shopping event, the Big Billion Days, launched on 8th October 2023. Competing with Flipkart, Amazon’s Great Indian Festival sale event started on October 8th as well and saw a whopping 95 Million customer visits to the website within the first 48 hours of the event.

For consumers, the most pressing question was, “Who offered more attractive deals and lower prices during these sale events?”

To answer this question, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform and analyzed the prices and discounts on Amazon and Flipkart across key product categories..

The details of our sample are mentioned below:
- Number of SKUs Analyzed: 30,000+
- Websites: Amazon.com and Flipkart.com
- Categories: Apparel, Home & Furniture, Electronics, Health & Beauty
- Dates: 7th Oct 2023 to 22nd Oct 2023
Key Findings

Based on our analysis, the Big Billion Days by Flipkart showcased relatively higher price reductions across categories compared to the Great Indian Festival sale by Amazon. The Apparel category on Flipkart saw the highest average discount at 50.6%. The Health & Beauty category had the lowest discount across Flipkart at 39.4% and Amazon at 33%.

Overall, Flipkart offered higher discounts in each product category. It is clear that the retailer invested heavily in leveraging its supplier partnerships with key brands or sellers to enable them to offer higher discounts, thereby attracting more customers.

Next, let’s take a closer look at each product category.

Apparel

While a majority of retailers expected demand for apparel and clothing to dip this festive season in India, eCommerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart are likely to recognize the strong consumer inclination towards apparel during this period.

In the detailed assessment of Apparel sub-categories, Women’s Dresses, Women’s Tops, Men’s Shirts, Men’s Shoes, and Women’s Innerwear emerged as the segments showcasing the most substantial discounts during the sale events. While Flipkart offered higher average discounts across all sub-categories, Amazon offered competitive discounts as well.

We observed significant differences in the average discounts across brands between Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon’s Great Indian Festival. Reinforcing the significant discounts on the Shoes subcategory, brands like Red Tape, Arrow, Adidas, Reebok, Nike, and more offered extensive discounts on both Flipkart and Amazon. Notably, Adidas and Reebok offered better deals on Amazon’s Great Indian Festival as compared to Flipkart.

One8 by Virat Kohli had a significantly lower discount on Amazon compared to Flipkart, indicating an exclusive partnership.

For brands, however, reducing prices is just one approach to entice shoppers. They must also guarantee their prominent presence and easy discoverability within Amazon and Flipkart search results. To gain insight into this, we monitored brands’ Share of Search across various frequently used search terms in addition to the discounts they provided. The Share of Search denotes the portion of a brand’s products within the top 20 search results for a specific search query.

Our data indicates that Jockey and Speedo gained in Share of Search on Flipkart, but reduced discoverability on Amazon. Van Heusen fell behind in search results on Flipkart but showed a higher Share of Search on Amazon.

Home & Furniture

With demand for home and furniture products picking up in October, right before the festive season, Amazon and Flipkart offered significant discounts in this category.

Discounts on both Amazon and Flipkart hovered around 50%. Across a few subcategories, Flipkart offered slightly lower discounts compared to Amazon. Only Luggage, Rugs, Sofas, and Entertainment Units saw lower markdowns on Flipkart during the Big Billion Days.

Dishwashers and Washer/ Dryers saw higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. The significant discounts on these products on Amazon possibly point to changing consumer preferences, as demand for these products is traditionally low in India, but seems to be growing.

When it comes to Home & Furniture brands, Nasher Miles, Safari, Aristocrat, VIP, and American Tourister, luggage brands mostly, offered higher discounts on Flipkart, followed closely by Amazon.

In terms of Share of Search, Skybags had high discoverability on both Flipkart and Amazon. The brand leveraged a strategy of offering big discounts this festive season as well as ensuring prominent placement in search results. Wildcraft lost out on its discoverability on Flipkart in contrast to its prominence on Amazon. Duroflex saw lower searchability on Amazon compared to Flipkart’s Big Billion Days.

Consumer Electronics

The Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturers Association (CEAMA) expected an uptick in sales of consumer electronics products this festive season in India. With more consumers buying premium products using credit cards and EMIs, demand for expensive, high-end electronics was expected to increase.

Again, average discounts in this category hovered around 50% on Flipkart and Amazon.

Across electronics subcategories, Smartwatches, Earbuds, and Drones had the highest markdowns with Flipkart leading the pack during the Big Billion Days. Amazon offered relatively higher discounts at 44.9% on the TV subcategory, compared to Flipkart’s 40.6%.

Speakers, Laptops, Smartphones, and Tablets also saw lower markdowns on Amazon compared to Flipkart. Amazon was the official partner for the launch of many high-level smartphones and products in September-October, contributing to the higher markdowns in the subcategory.

Across brands, Lenovo’s discounts were the most differentiated between the two sites, with the brand offering higher discounts on Amazon (45.4%) compared to Flipkart (24.7%). Noise offered the highest discounts at 72.5% on Amazon and 52.8% on Flipkart. Brands like Boat and Zebronics, also saw lower discounts on Flipkart.

Mi and JBL offered deeper discounts on Flipkart’s Big Billion Days. Apple meanwhile stands out with only 11.83% discounts on Amazon, but the brand offered impressive 31.4% discounts on Flipkart.

Samsung dominated the Share of Search on Amazon at 15.7%, compared to only 2.6% on Flipkart. Apple and Lenovo also saw higher discoverability on Amazon. On Flipkart, JBL and Skullcandy stand out as brands with high search visibility.

Health & Beauty

The Health & Beauty category saw the lowest markdowns with only 39.4% discounts on Flipkart and 33% on Amazon.

In the subcategories analyzed, Electric Toothbrushes had relatively high markdowns across both sites. Staple and lower priced subcategories like Toothpaste had the lowest markdowns across both sale events, with Amazon offering only 17.4% average discounts.

Across brands, Beardo, a leading beard care brand, offered significantly higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. Most other well-known brands, including Nivea and Vaseline, saw higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. Only Tresmme and Dove were exceptions with higher discounts on Flipkart.

In terms of Share of Search, once again, Beardo was the most discoverable brand in this category. Brands like Dove, Pond’s, Swiss Beauty, and Tresemme saw a lower Share of Search on Flipkart compared to Amazon.

Navigating the Competitive Landscape: How To Thrive During Sale Events

Amazon and Flipkart’s strategic pricing during the Big Billion Days and the Great Indian Festival Sale reflects a balance of profitability, inventory, and competition. Competitive pricing insights empower retailers to make informed decisions, optimize strategies, and thrive during high-stakes sale events with timely and relevant insights at a massive scale.

To learn more about how you can leverage competitive pricing insights to stay ahead of the game during sale events, reach out to us today!
December 20, 2023
Amazon Great Indian Festival Vs Big Billion Day- Who offered better discounts?

The Great Indian Festival finally arrived and it coincided with Flipkart’s Big Billion Day Sale. The pandemic has pushed consumers to shop online and both, the Great Indian Festival and the Big Billion Day sales had been eagerly anticipated. Flipkart’s sale lasted between 16-21 October, while Amazon’s (in India) took started on 17th October.

It is claimed that Amazon and Flipkart have hit $3.5 billion in sales in just four days. On the last day of its Sale, Flipkart claimed to have achieved 10 times growth as compared to last year’s Big Billion Day sale. Clearly, the sales have surpassed all the forecasts made for this year’s sale. We at DataWeave took a closer look to analyze the discounts that were offered across popular categories, to see if customers really had access to better deals and discounts.

Our Methodology:

We looked at the top 500 products across categories like Fashion – men and women, electronics, Amazon devices, baby products, grocery and personal care. The pricing offered on these products across the sale period was compared with the pre-sale price, to understand the trend in discounts across the popular categories and brands.

The Verdict:

We segmented the products we were tracking into the following:

Type 1: Products were either priced the same or were discounted over the sale compared to pre-sale

Type 2: Products were either priced the same or witnessed price increase during the sale compared to pre-sale

Type 3: Products which saw both price increase and decrease during sale compared to pre-sale

Type 4: Products whose price continued to be the same even during the sale

Flipkart clearly provided the better deals to customers for the categories we looked at during their Big Billion Day sale compared to Amazon. Flipkart discounted 54% of its products during the sale period compared to Amazon, and 26% of the products were discounted.

It is also interesting to note that in addition to offering more discounted products, Flipkart also offered additional discounts than Amazon.

Amazon offered 13.2% additional discount and most of this average discounting can be attributed to a 33.8% discount on Amazon devices. It also ended up increasing the pricing for 16% of the products during the sale period, while Flipkart hiked the pricing for 6% products. 56% of products on Amazon continued being sold at the same price even during the sale.

Additional discounts across product premiumness levels

Premiumness was based on the actual price of a product before the sale event. This was divided into low, medium and high premiumness levels, with high indicating higher selling prices.

In Amazon devices, baby products, electronics and grocery-cooking essentials, Amazon showed a direct relationship between its additional discounts and the level of premiumness. While Flipkart did not seem to follow a particular pattern with respect to product premiumness.

Flipkart offered the highest discounts for premium products in the Fashion category (for both men and women) compared to the rest.

Top brands by additional discounts:

We looked at popular brands across categories to arrive at brands that were being sold at the maximum discount. These brands appeared at least twenty times in the top 500 ranks we considered.

Acer, Philips, Samsung, Lenovo, Bajaj, Asus which were common brands across both Flipkart and Amazon in the electronics category, were being sold at much deeper discounts on Flipkart (almost double), compared to that on Amazon.

Avita was extremely popular under the laptop sub-category on Flipkart and was observed to be discounted the highest during the sale.

In Fashion, Titan was the most discounted brand with 53.9% additional discount but only 4% and 2% of the products offered discounting in mens’ and womens’ fashion respectively. Reebok in mens’ fashion and Fastrack, Sonata and Puma in womens’ wear on Flipkart, had discounts across almost all the products.

In the baby care category, Hasbro gaming on Flipkart had the highest additional discount followed by Funskool. Both the brands had more than 85% of their products discounted.

Johnson’s, which was common on both Amazon and Flipkart, was offered at higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. However, only 31% products were discounted vs 72% on Flipkart.

Most Visible Brands

We looked at the top 200 ranks across each sub-category to narrow down on the most visible brands across the sale period.

Across all categories and their sub-categories, the sub-category laptop had distinct brands that hold the majority of the products. This is observed both in Amazon and Flipkart where brands like Lenovo, HP, Asus hold more than 33% share of the first 200 products.

“Mobile” category was dominated by brands like Redmi and Boat on Amazon, and Realme and OPPO on Flipkart. These brands occur at least 24% of the time in the top 200 ranks.

Who Won?

There are many ways to look at this. To begin with, the combined sales of Flipkart and Amazon during the festive season in India accounted for more than 90% of the e-commerce industry’s gross sales. That amounts to a 55% year-on-year growth. Delving further, we see that Flipkart was far more aggressive with their offerings.

They discounted 56.8% additional products at an overall discount of 15%. On the other hand, Amazon retained their typical cautious approach to discounting, with only 28.4% of the products, at an overall discount of 12.8%.

If we adopt a more macro view of the sales, we have to take into account that this year is somewhat of an anomaly. Given the social distancing norms and other SOPs governing the common man, more people have been ushered into the world of online shopping. The penetration extended far into the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as well, thus potentially benefiting Flipkart, owing to their interior reach.

Going by the numbers, Flipkart seems to have taken this round without a doubt. As we observed though, there are many ways to look at this and what seems to stand out from these two giants, is the consumer. At the end of the day, it’s the consumer that in spite of these strange times, has shopped more than before, indicating that the situation is getting back to a semblance of normalcy.

So Flipkart’s got the sales numbers but the consumer got deeper discounts on more products. As the old adage goes, ‘consumer is king’.

November 4, 2020