NEW DELHI: Digital commerce platform Meesho on Tuesday said it has onboarded over one lakh new sellers ahead of its four-day festive sale that kicks off on October 6, and expects 3X more daily orders from customers in tier II cities.
Meesho's flagship sale event - The Maha Indian Shopping League - will be held from October 6-9, 2021 that will connect customers to about 2.5 lakh sellers and over 700 product categories.
"Our maiden 'Maha Indian Shopping League' looks to reimagine conventional festive sale experiences and add to the tier II-plus users' celebrations...We've added one lakh sellers and expanded our product roster to over 700 categories, right ahead of the sale," Meesho Vice President and GM, Business Utkrishta Kumar told PTI.
Kumar added that with this, Meesho is now expecting 3X more daily orders during the festive season compared to September-exit BAU (business as usual). Kumar said Meesho is focused on its vision to enable 100 million small businesses to succeed online.
"With a host of innovations, tech and logistical support, Meesho sellers can reach out to a wider customer base online and leverage the Maha Indian Shopping League to drive sales and order growth during the festive season.
"Early this year, the company announced an industry-first zero per cent seller commission model that saw a 10x growth in sellers joining the platform," he said.
In the last 6 months, Meesho has seen its monthly transacting users grow by 2.8x while monthly orders rising by 2.5X. Also, 40 per cent of Meesho's new users from the same period were also first-time e-commerce users.
Asked about how Meesho had scaled its infrastructure ahead of the festive season, Kumar said with deep third-party logistics integrations, the company is ensuring last-mile connectivity and access to all Meesho users.
"We currently service 27,000-plus pin-codes throughout the country. We have also made significant additions to our tech stack to ensure we're well prepared to provide fulfilling experiences during the Maha Indian Shopping League. For the first time, Meesho has now enabled its mobile and desktop website for even non-app users to have the same rewarding shopping experience," he added.
To make shopping even more seamless, Meesho has launched multiple features like high-visibility filters and made checkout flows much shorter, Kumar said.
The sale will feature Meesho's personalised user feeds and a data-science led product listing page to fuel better, more relevant product discovery, he added.
Vidit Aatrey, founder and CEO of Meesho said today, 5 per cent of Indian households shop with Meesho every day.
"To truly democratise internet commerce, we have lowered entry barriers and improved ease of business for sellers, enabling more local businesses across the country to join us and sell online. This ultimately improves access to a range of quality products for all tier II-plus shoppers," he added.
E-commerce companies see a large chunk of their annual business coming in during the festive sales and they make significant investments ahead of time to ramp up their capacity and add features to be able to handle the spike in orders, while ensuring a smooth experience for shoppers and sellers.
Companies across the spectrum including Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal and Myntra have lined up new launches and offers to woo shoppers during the festive season. Players hold multiple sale events that are timed around Dussehra and Diwali.
Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform, Udaan has also announced the second edition of its 'Mega Bharat Sale' from October 6-12, 2021.
During the sale period, small retailers and kirana shop owners from across the country will get an opportunity to make huge savings across a wide selection of quality products with over 100-plus brands and over 5,000 SKUs (Stock-Keeping Units) from small and large fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands.
On Sunday, e-commerce majors Flipkart and Amazon India had said they have witnessed a strong start to this year's festive sale, with demand from tier-II and -III cities driving the momentum.
While Flipkart's The Big Billion Days (TBBD) sale is an eight-day event that will end on October 10, Amazon India's GIF will be a month-long affair.
Myntra said its 'Big Fashion Festival' (BFF) saw nearly six lakh items being bought in the first hour of its sale.
The opening day saw about 19 million visitors, while customers shopped for over 4 million items, of which 40 per cent of the orders were from tier II cities and beyond.
A Snapdeal spokesperson said nearly 43 per cent of Snapdeal's orders are flowing from tier III cities like Dhanbad, Karimnagar, Gorakhpur, Chittor, Kurnool, Srinagar, Guntur and Alwar.
The fashion category continues to draw maximum business with men's apparel (T-shirts, shirts), women's ethnic wear, footwear and fashion accessories amongst the most popular buys.
Home and kitchen products, and general merchandise like home decorative and lighting are other popular sale items, the spokesperson added.
Consulting firm RedSeer said e-commerce platforms are expected to potentially clock over USD 9 billion GMV (gross merchandise value) during the festive season this year as against USD 7.4 billion last year a growth of 23 per cent.
During the first week of the festive season, these platforms are expected to register 30 per cent year-on-year growth in gross GMV to USD 4.8 billion.
Gross GMV refers to the total value of goods sold on the platform prior to subtracting cancellation or return.
The report highlighted that in terms of categories, fashion is expected to see a steady recovery this festive season, in line with greater outdoor mobility of consumers and steady rebound of fashion/office wear.