Battle for supremacy: Amazon claims top spot

The company also witnessed a surge of 86% in the number of new customers from smaller towns

Amazon India has come out all guns blazing as it claimed the top spot this festive season, days after Flipkart said that it had made the competition “irrelevant”.
 
Flipkart has been flaunting a report from market watcher RedSeer Management Consulting that claims the Kalyan Krishnamurthy-led firm had been able to capture almost 58 per cent of the market share during the first five days of the sale period, which stood at Rs 9,000 crore.  
 
Amazon India on Friday said that according to a study done by market research, survey and business consultancy firm IMRB, Amazon.in had more transacting customers than any other online destination. The study also shows that Amazon.in had the higher number of customers as well as the maximum number of orders placed through the festive season, the company said.
 
Amazon India Senior Vice-President and Country Head Amit Agarwal claimed this year’s festive sales to be the biggest yet and said that the online marketplace giant is the undisputed leader.  
 
“We are humbled by the tremendous response from customers making Amazon.in the undisputed leader in the e-commerce industry with the most number of transacting customers and order share. More customers shopped on Amazon.in than anywhere else with orders received from 99.7 per cent of India’s pin codes. Customers shopped across mobile phones, TVs, large appliances, home décor, furniture, sports equipment and everyday essentials, making the Great Indian Festival the biggest shopping event for Amazon.in in history,” said Agarwal.
 
The company also witnessed a surge of 86 per cent in the number of new customers from smaller towns. Its loyalty programme Prime continued to be a bestseller during the festival, with membership doubling since July 2017. India accounted for the highest number of Prime members in a debut year, growing the fastest among the 13 countries where Amazon Prime is available.
 
“Customers voted for Amazon Pay as a trusted and convenient way to pay and we saw more new customers this festive season top up their balances than ever before. More customers chose to use Amazon Pay to pay for their orders. There was a 34x increase in the number of top-ups,” the company said.  
 
Amazon that during the festival season it more than doubled its sales on a year-on-year basis through repeat purchases. More than 66 per cent people visited Amazon.in across multiple days of the event to check out deals and discounts, the company said.
 

Flipkart since the beginning of the festive sales has been in a game of oneupmanship with Amazon. Even before the sales started reports came out that the Bengaluru-based online marketplace had tasked its top executives with a 70-30 lead over its rivals.  
 
While refraining from sharing any data to substantiate its claim, Flipkart had recently said that it had won this year’s festive season. “We have made the competition irrelevant and have surpassed them on every count. In a lot of categories where we were the underdogs going in, we believe that we have beaten them,” Smrithi Ravichandran, senior director at Flipkart, said.
 
Flipkart claimed that it was able to grow sales in every major category on its platform — smartphones by five times, large appliances by 10 times, fashion and home by four times and electronics by seven times, compared to sales during 30 days in a non-sale period.