CHENNAI: With the festive season round the corner, from banks to e-retailers all have geared up to entice consumers with discounts in numerous forms.
With Onam and Ganesh Chaturthi, coming shortly after the GST implementation, not setting sales on fire, India Inc is now banking on the crucial festive season for consumer sentiments to pick up. And, according to experts, the uptick in economic activity could set the tone for better quarters ahead.
This festive season, consumers can look forward to some lofty discounts with e-commerce firms rolling out their annual festive sales in the third week of September. Big players like Flipkart, Amazon and Paytm have a wide range of products on offer across categories like smartphones, home decor, apparel etc.
Flipkart, for the first time on ‘Big Billion Day’, will offer consumers the option to choose EMIs on debit cards across top banks in the country. Even niche players like Naaptol anticipates 25-30% increase in orders. “Festive season is very critical for us as it contributes to 20 per cent of our annual sales. We do an average of 30,000 orders every day and we hope to cross the 40,000 orders per day mark this season,” said Manu Agarwal, founder & CEO, Naaptol.
Banks, on the other hand, have started attracting loan seekers with discounts in the form of processing fee waivers. While many banks have waived the processing fee on car loans till end of September, the country’s largest lender State Bank of India has waived the processing fee for car and personal loans till the end of 2017. Scrapping processing fee or a marginal reduction in the interest rate would help banks get a larger market share during this season, say analysts.
Automobile companies are also expecting to see their wheels moving this festive season as it is coming out of the regulatory headwinds and dent in sales that they have faced over the past few quarters. Car makers have already started offering discounts on vehicles, mostly the older variants to push their retail sales.
With the festive season at its peak, discounts also get extended to pre-owned cars. “We expect three times more traffic than our usual sales,” said Shubh Bansal, co-founder and chief of marketing at Truebil. Auto dealers are also offering free insurance, exchange bonuses and government employee benefits which reduce the price of the vehicles on the whole.