Google And Indian Ecommerce Companies Are Calling GOSF A Success

Google’s move to popularize e-commerce in India seems to have been a success according to information put out by e-commerce companies following yesterday’s GOSF (Great Online Shopping Festival). Google partnered with various Indian e-commerce players in the country to bring the popular western concept of Cyber Monday to Indian shores.

The online shopping festival lasted for a day and was advertised as having never-seen-before kind of discounts. When I checked the GOSF website yesterday, I realized that the deals that were offered were not very compelling. The Cyber Monday concept in the US, UK and other countries are known for offering crazy discounts. This is however, my opinion and doesn’t seem to be reflected in the sales figures/percentages announced by the participating e-commerce companies. According to a press release given out by Google after the shopping event, it seems most e-commerce companies saw increased sales and traffic of 50%. The release further says that there were instances of items were being sold out by 3 pm in the afternoon. Some of the prominent e-commerce website who participated have released encouraging stats from the sale.

Myntra claims to have experienced a 75% increase in traffic and a 120% increase in sales.

Homeshop18 announced that they had seen a 3x increase in sales and sold off most of their electronics and lifestyle items by 3.00 pm.

Indiatimes Shopping experienced a 40% increase in unique traffic . 70% of the transactions from yesterday were made by shoppers who have never visited the site before.

Snapdeal says that they have seen a 50% jump in traffic. They said they were expecting similar jump in sales as well but no data has been communicated by them.

Pepperfry saw a traffic increase of 40%  and a 25+% increase in sales.

Google India’s Rajan Anandan had this to say about GOSF,

“This is by far the biggest online shopping event that India has witnessed in the history of eCommerce in the country. All our partners have seen massive increase in online traffic and some of them had already sold out their stocks by 3:00pm. The response has been phenomenal and beyond our expectations and we hope that this initiative will further fuel the growth of online shopping in India.”

There was some controversy about some shady behavior by Flipkart though. It seems they had jacked up the prices for the event, making it look like they were giving a discount for the event, even though the selling prices were lower even before GOSF. Here is a link to Joel Fernandes’ blog which documents the discrepancy. Flipkart has said that it was an honest error. Well, that maybe so, but what if all e-commerce companies are doing this systematically so that they can spike up their sales revenue. A trustworthy friend of mine has experienced this pricing discrepancy first hand. There is no hard evidence right now but Joel’s post can certainly  be considered as one.

Besides this, the shopping festival seems to have been a success all around. Let’s see if this can get bigger next year around.

Did you take advantage of the deals yesterday? Share your experiences with us.

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