Flipkart aims to double sales from Big Billion Days
BENGALURU: India’s biggest online retailer Flipkart plans to hold its annual flagship Big Billion Days (BB D) sale from September 20-24 this year and aims to more than double sales from the five-day event compared with last year.
This will be the fourth edition of Flipkart’s Diwali season sale, which it first launched in October 2014, partly inspired by the Singles Day sale held by China’s Alibaba Group every year.
During the five-day event, Flipkart is expected to woo new customers with deep discounts, no-cost EMIs (equated monthly inst al men ts) and other new offers such as debit card EMIs.
Amazon India is also expected to hold its Great Indian Sale around the same time in September in what will be the biggest showdown in Indian e-commerce, which over the past 12 months has turned into a twohorse race between Flipkart and theAmericane-commercegiant.
According to a top company executive, Flipkart will aim to grow sales by“two to three times” compared with last year’s numbers. Last year, Flip kart had generated gross sales of at least ₹3,000 crore (or close to $500 million) during the five-day event, Mint reported on 8 October.
That would imply that Flip kart is aiming to touch sales of around ₹6,000-9,000 crore during the fiveday event this year. If Flipkart does manage to hit those ambitious targets, or even get close to those numbers, it would put BB D in the same league as the Singles Day sale.
“The BB D numbers that we are looking for this year—coming on the back of last year which itself was a very successful BBD— we’re talking about a (figure that is) 2x to 3x of that,” said Smrithi Ravichandran, a senior director at Flipkart.
He, however, declined to comment on the exact sales figures that Flipkart is targeting during BBD. “We’re in an industry where the competition is cutthroat and it is effectively a fight between two players ... we want to ensure that we widen our gap with our nearest competitor.”
Sales during BBD would mostly be driven by key categories such as smartphones, large appliances and the newly launched furniture business, as well as fashion, in which Flip kart is a market leader, including sales from its Mynt ra and Ja bong units, Ravichandran said.
“The deals and discounts will be there, no two ways about it... this year we’ve also added new features such as buy back guarantee and debit card EMIs,” Ravich an dr an said .“We’ re hiring rapidly on both the customer support front as well as the supply chain side (for BBD)... a lot of the hiring will not just be for BBD, but also for new differentiated offerings that we will launch post-BBD.”
Flipkart will head into BBD flush with funds and a war chest of $4 billion. “Our focus this year is to ensure a high uniqueness quotient to our selection across categories,” Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said.