Small towns drive online gold sales this Dhanteras
NEW DELHI: Every year, the news media reports the surge in sales of gold on Dhanteras, which falls two days before Diwali, complete with pictures of buyers thronging jewellery stores.
This year, too, the sales surged — but with a difference. This Dhanteras, from gold coins to precious jewellery items, people purchased everything online.
While buyers from metro cities led online gold shopping, buyers from non-metro, so-called tier-2 and tier-3 cities boosted jewellery sales across e-commerce platforms.
On Amazon, for instance, small towns constituted 20% of gold jewellery sales, from just single-digits last year. Of these, 12% were to first-time shoppers for jewellery on Amazon. Market leader Flipkart too said orders for gold had come from 53 new towns this October.
Explaining the demand from non-metro cities, Mayank Shivam, category leader, Amazon Fashion, said: “Customers from non-metro cities have limited access to jewellery brands. They get the whole collection at one place on our platform.”
Over 60% of jewellery orders were placed using mobile phones. In non-metro centres, this percentage goes up, Shivam said.
Bluestone.com, a Ratan Tatafunded online jewellery retailer, fulfilled 2,000 orders from nonmetros in October 2016 compared to 1,000 orders last October. Around 30% of sales revenue comes from non-metro centres.
“The variety of designs and access to more designs options in a particular price range — ₹15,000 to ₹40,000 — are drawing more customers online from nonmetro cities,” said Arvind Singhal, COO, BlueStone.com. “About 60% of the products were for cash-on-delivery.”
Snapdeal also confirmed the rise in online jewellery sale. “We saw sizeable purchases from tier 2 and 3 cities,” a Snapdeal spokesperson said.
According to World Gold Council data, Indian gold demand for jewellery has shot up from 88.4 tonnes in the first quarter of 2016 to 97.9 tonnes in the second quarter. For gold bought as investment, the numbers rose from 28 tonnes in Q1 to 33.1 tonnes in Q2.
E-commerce sites have seen a steady rise in demand for jewellery. Amazon registered over six times growth in its precious jewellery segment this year, compared to last festive season, in terms of units sold. Overall gold sales at Flipkart was four times more than last year, a company spokesperson said. Bluestone had an annualised turnover of ₹150 crore in 2014-15 which grew to ₹250 crore in 2015-16.