Amazon receives orders from 99.3% of India's pin codes during festive sale

Sellers at Amazon.in witnessed their biggest Great Indian Festival (GIF) festive sale, enabling them to reach millions of customers across all corners of the country amid the pandemic. The month-long GIF began on midnight of October 16 with Prime Early Access and opened up for all customers on October 17.

Sellers from 6,387 pin-codes received orders; 1 out of 2 sellers saw their biggest day of sales. Amazon said close to 600 sellers saw more than Rs 1 crore in sales and nearly 6,500 sellers saw more than Rs 10 lakh in sales. A significant chunk of customers came from Bharat (tier-2, tier-3 cities and rural parts of the country) to shop on Amazon. The company said it received orders from 99.3 per cent of India’s pin-codes.

Amazon.in is battling Walmart-owned Flipkart and Reliance's JioMart in India's booming online retail market.

“We added lakhs of direct and indirect jobs and enabled tens of thousands of local stores and service partners across 350 cities who witnessed their most successful business month of the year,” said Manish Tiwary, vice president, Amazon India. “We are delighted and humbled that Amazon.in is not only trusted by customers and small businesses alike, but is also playing a role in helping our partners drive back economic growth in India.”

Prime members in 98.3 per cent of India’s pin-codes place orders. About 3X more customers signed up for Prime during the festive season with 3 out of 5 sign-ups from beyond the metros.

Close to 74,000 sellers who received an order were from smaller cities such as Chikkaballapur in Karnataka, Virudhunagar in Tamil Nadu and Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh. The other such places included Moga in Punjab, Ri-Bhoi in Meghalaya, Malda in West Bengal and Navsari in Gujarat.

Customers managed their budget through affordability programs fueling consumption across the country.

Credit amount of Rs 2,700 crore was disbursed through partners.

Top categories were smartphones, large appliances and fashion. The other categories included consumer electronics, home and kitchen. About 50 per cent of all premium smartphones being bought on Amazon.in were 5G ready. Over 1.5 million customers bought a phone from Amazon for the first time. Customers purchased more iPhones in 29 days of the GIF than all of last year

There were also the biggest sales ever for Amazon Devices.

Artificial intelligence-based voice assistant Alexa answered over 16 million requests to guide customers to their product searches, best deals, bill payments, music and more on the Amazon shopping app.

“We are extremely delighted with our sales that went up by over 20 times this Great Indian Festival,” said Jaipur-based Deepak Badaria of JH Gallery. “We saw great response for our festive selection, especially Kathputli Diyas, with orders from over 1,400 pin codes.”

Quirky flavours of the Great Indian Festival:

Customers bought as much body lotion to fill over 220 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Diapers sold were sufficient for 8.9 crore babies.

Enough food to feed 90 lakh dogs a meal.

All the dishwashers bought can wash over 80,000 utensils at one go.

Enough mattresses purchased to cover an area equal to 10 Eden Garden cricket grounds.

Number of office chairs equivalent to opening over 1,100 mid-sized offices.

Number of shoes equal to the weight of 9 Boeing 747 aircraft.

Fulfilment Centres operated with a total build space of over 20 cricket stadiums.

On busiest delivery days, Amazon sourced 60 per cent of total cargo freighters in India to deliver packages.

Delivery associates travelled a distance equivalent to 960 times around the world in the last 10 days to deliver customer orders.