Festive sales catapult Flipkart, Meesho, Amazon to the top of Google Play charts

It’s that time of the year, when Indian consumers rush to retail markets — both offline and online — to make their last-minute festive purchases. Every year, e-commerce giants Amazon and Flipkart have been holding mega sales to coincide with this period of high demand, new launches, and large volumes. 

Both Flipkart’s annual ‘Big Billion Days’ sales and Amazon’s competing ‘The Great Indian Festival’ kicked off on September 23. Even homegrown Meesho, which is fast becoming a challenger to the Flipkart-Amazon duopoly, launched its ‘Mega Blockbuster Sale’ around the same time. 

Less than three days into the festive sales, all three e-commerce apps have topped Google Play India charts. They have surpassed communication and social apps, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, which typically dominate Indian app stores. While Flipkart, Meesho, and Amazon occupied the top three positions on Google Play, Flipkart-owned Shopsy, which is targeted at Bharat users, ranked No. 4. Fashion commerce app Myntra, meanwhile, grabbed the 10th spot. While another Flipkart Group app, PhonePe, was ranked at No. 7. 

Google Play’s real-time ranking lists apps based on current downloads and engagement (and not on lifetime downloads and app visits). 

Even on the Apple App Store, Flipkart and Amazon were placed in the third and sixth positions respectively. While app-specific data for new downloads in the month of September is not yet available, SimilarWeb data suggests that Amazon.in clocked 339.2 million visits in August 2022, while Flipkart saw 199.5 million visits in the same period. 

In the first 36 hours of the ongoing festive sale, Amazon recorded its single-largest day of Prime sign-ups, which is 1.9X higher than last year. Of this, 68 per cent came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and more than 10 lakh unique products were sold on the platform, the company revealed.

Manish Tiwary, VP & Country Manager, India Consumer Business, Amazon, said, “It is encouraging to witness small and medium businesses, startups, artisans, women entrepreneurs offer a wide selection of products to our customers across India. We are humbled by the increase in new Prime member sign-ups and customers shopping across categories.”

Flipkart, on the other hand, claimed 1.6 million on the first day of BBD sales. Without sharing sales figures, the Walmart-owned company said that festive demand is significantly higher than in 2021. 

SoftBank-backed Meesho, meanwhile, saw record orders of 87.6 lakh on the first day of sale, clocking an 80 per cent growth over last year, with ​​small business participation surging 360 per cent. Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities accounted for almost 85 per cent of orders placed on day one. 

Utkrishta Kumar, CXO - Business at Meesho, said, “The Mega Blockbuster Sale has started on a high trajectory with a very strong response on day one. This performance is a reflection of the unmatched value sellers and consumers get on our platform, and a validation of our relentless efforts towards democratizing internet commerce.”

Across platforms, categories such as smartphones, laptops, large appliances, fashion, furniture, etc. witnessed maximum demand. Much of sales volumes was also driven by attractive buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) offers and EMI options facilitated by partner banks. 

“1 out of 4 purchases on Amazon.in were made on EMI; 2 out of 3 products were sold on No Cost EMIs. Amazon Pay Later registrations increased by 4X in 36 hours,” the Seattle-based ecom giant stated.

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