Google, e-commerce firms to bring 'Cyber Monday' to India

The term Cyber Monday created by marketing companies to persuade people to shop online

In a bid to boost online shopping adoption in India, leading e-commerce players and Google have come together to bring the concept of Cyber Monday to India - titled ‘Great Online Shopping Festival’ slated for 12.12.12 (December, 12, 2012).

Cyber Monday is a marketing term for the Monday after Black Friday, the Friday following Thanksgiving in the US. The term Cyber Monday was created by marketing companies to persuade people to shop online. The term made its debut on November 28, 2005. In 2010, comScore reported that consumers spent $1.028 billion online on Cyber Monday (excluding travel, 2009: $887 million), the highest spending day of 2010.

With over 137 million Internet users in the country, India is witnessing a significant growth in the online activity and this is for the first time, an industry-wide initiative of this scale is being attempted to offer users all across the country an incentive to gain from unbeatable deals that they can find on the web on a single day, a press release said.

The Great Online Shopping Festival will see the participation from over 50 partners including leading e-commerce, local and classified, online travel sites and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) industry offering their best deals to customers all across India for 24 hours.

The initiative is aimed at encouraging shoppers to adopt online shopping with a focus to reach out to first time online buyers. The participating companies will also offer special deals for the first time buyers on their websites. The festival will offer them an opportunity to shop for jewellery, shoes, apparel, travel packages, books, kids wear, gadgets, watches, computer accessories, health and fitness equipment, home decor products and great deals on real estate.

“The online shopping industry is already over $1.5-billion and with this initiative we want to reach out and promote online shopping to the first time buyers. The industry has done a lot to promote e-commerce adoption in India and we are partnering them to provide the users an easy access to all the deals,” said Rajan Anandan, managing director and vice-president (sales and operations), Google India.

“This is a great initiative which will bring together the industry and all leading players under one roof’ and will further boost adoption of online shopping in India. It will expand our reach beyond the 18 million Snapdeal subscribers and will help us attract and reach more buyers,” said Kunal Bahl, co-founder and chief executive of Snapdeal.com.