After record sales during its six-day Great Indian Festival, Amazon, one of the largest e-tailers in the country, is all geared up for Diwali with new products and sales offerings. The e-commerce giant has lined up 2,00,000 products for its Diwali sales, said Amazon India vice-president Manish Tiwary in an interview with Bismah Malik. Excerpts:
Geared up for Diwali?
The festival season offerings are an ongoing process. Every year we reach out to sellers and consumers in innovative ways. This year, we got in touch with these targeted groups via Amazon’s festival yatra. We began the Diwali sales offers from October 12 itself. Our focus now is on the delivery speed and customers’ convenience. Diwali is grand for us because Indian customers usually go for bulk orders during this season.
Does Amazon plan to expand its offline presence to tier 2 and 3 cities, from where the demand peaked during the festival sales?
We are focused on the next 100 million customers and a lot of them come from these cities. Our interaction with customers from these regions has particularly increased when we developed our Amazon Hindi interface and simplified our platform with more visuals. The Amazon physical stores help customers shop online by helping them understand the process. We have over 40,000 such stores.
There are contrarian views on whether Amazon or Flipkart dominated the online festival sales?
I stand by the statement of Amazon India head Amit Aggarwal about us leading India’s online market. (Aggarwal, quoting a report from market research firm Nielson, had said Amazon was able to capture 46 per cent of e-commerce market share during the festival sales. On the contrary, consulting firm Redseer had positioned Flipkart as the market leader). We believe in data that is credible and robust. Nielsen is India’s largest research firm, and its research had 1,90,000 respondents across 50 cities. So, any question of us lagging behind doesn’t arise.
Apart from mobile phones, what other products have seen the greatest demand?
We saw big launches such as OnePlus TV and Samsung LCDs. Furniture, grocery, home, kitchen appliances and fashion segments have made huge sales for us this time. Wireless, large appliances and consumer electronics have always been in demand and we are well prepared to face any spike in demand for them during festivals. This Diwali, we have around 2,00,000 product offerings for customers.
Is technology a challenge for small-town sellers?
Digitisation hasn’t become a roadblock for our half-a-million sellers, weavers and artisans. In fact, it has turned them into a global community.