Festive season sales: Over 3k Flipkart sellers sold goods beyond Rs 10 lakh

Sellers saw 70% of their e-commerce demand being drive by Flipkart alone

While e-commerce marketplace Flipkart might have outsold rival Amazon by a factor of two in the largest sale of this festival season, sellers embedded on the platform, too, witnessed their best-selling days this year.

Flipkart has claimed that, this year, over 3,000 sellers saw sales exceed the Rs 10-lakh-mark in the five-day sale period that ended last week. Moreover, its dominance in the market meant sellers saw 70 per cent of their e-commerce demand being driven by Flipkart alone.

“Sales were twice as much as what we did in the last Big Billion Days sale, and this was seen across our seller base. This ensured our seller satisfaction scores, through the sale, was at 95 per cent,” said Nishant Gupta, head of marketplace business, seller and marketing support at Flipkart.

Flipkart claimed that it had captured 70 per cent of the e-commerce market in India during the five days that ended on September 24. Analyst RedSeer Consulting said the home-grown e-tailer’s share of the market was closer to 58 per cent, still more than double that of its closest rival Amazon.

Key to this success, the company said, was preparation that began eight months in advance. The company began sharing insights with its sellers on what products sell well during the festival season to what sort of discounts they should be offering. Three months prior to the sale, the company began implementing this by asking sellers to begin stocking up.

“We even discussed what type of fulfilment needs to be done for specific parts of their inventory. Whether it needs to be in Flipkart warehouses or the seller’s own warehouse, and those constructs then get frozen,” added Gupta.

Planning the most minute details was what Flipkart said helped it win. Moreover, to boost the morale of sellers during the sale this year, it even rolled out a programme to reward employees of its sellers.

Last year, Flipkart underwent an exercise to weed out bad sellers in an attempt to improve customer experience and reduce costs attached to servicing its sellers. The company even incentivised sellers who had fewer product returns, which is a huge cost for an e-commerce marketplace, to sell more products on their platform.

On the other hand, Amazon claimed it had a large base of sellers, in excess of 225,000 on its platform in the country. The company said its biggest focus area since the roll-out of Prime had been to get products to customers’ doorsteps in the shortest period possible. For this, Amazon devised Seller Flex and Easy Ship, exclusively for India.