“I have been here [in Amazon] for nine years plus and this has been one of the smoothest Diwali that we have had,” says Amit Nanda, Director-Selling Partner Services at Amazon India. “And it has been the largest Diwali for us over all these years, across multiple dimensions. I think what we set out to do, as part of the Diwali, we have been able to tick most of the boxes and achieved most of what we wanted to.”
Amazon says one big aim was to get more sellers to succeed in the Diwali sale, and the first step was to get them to participate in it. “We did that by giving new sellers a fee waiver, and we had a 50% fee waiver campaign. We also wanted the sellers to get their friends and family to take part in it and extend the festive season. So we had set up a member-get-member kind of referral system,” says Nanda.
Amazon says over 30% more small and medium businesses (SMBs) participated in the Great Indian Festival this year than last year.
Close to 40,000 sellers had their largest single day sale at the event, says the marketplace. It sees this as a significant achievement.
“Around 20% of these, which is around 6,500, got a spike of more than 5x in sales over last Diwali. To get a five times spike during Diwali sales makes a big difference to a lot of businesses because they rely on the scale that they achieved in Diwali to get their costs down for the next full year,” says Nanda. Other initiatives involved handholding the sellers, helping them with inventory management, demand forecasting, planning for the sale and establishing multi-channel fulfilment centres.
Amit Nanda, Director-Selling Partner Services at Amazon India.
Explaining why the event was a success, Nanda says: “Our first big metric was that we wanted more sellers to be successful. We have had an increase of 35% over the last year in terms of the number of sellers who were successful. The second metric is that close to 65% of the sellers were from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. And the reason this is so energising and encouraging is because we always feel that in the top cities, they have an ecosystem that can support them. There is knowledge. They have friends who can tell them how to go about this. But typically sellers from these smaller cities have struggled a bit to grow the business.”
Amazon says it also measures absolute size as a marker for success. One of these is the number of sellers who got Rs 1 crore in sales on the marketplace during the sale. “We had close to 750 sellers who crossed Rs 1-crore sales in this period. Close to 32,000 sellers reached Rs 1 lakh during this period. And I think it’s important to see that this is business on one marketplace. A lot of them would work across different marketplaces and they would also have an offline business. So, this gives them a big fillip in terms of the scale that they have been able to get,” says Nanda.
The director at Amazon India says certain specific seller cohorts tasted success. “For example, we found 38% to 40% of the startups who were selling in the segment called ‘Launchpad’, which are brands with innovative products, have doubled their sales.”
Women entrepreneurs and artisans sold over 13 units per minute, while sellers on “Local Shops” launched over 20 lakh new products. Most popular products sold by sellers on “Local Shops” were Airtel DTH HD set-top box, Organic India Tulsi Honey Chamomile Tea Bags, Firefox Bikes Bicycle, Omkar Plastic Chair and Aroma symvi Torch Light.
Top product categories under its “Saheli Program” included apparel, home and kitchen items, shoes and bags. Bengal handloom sarees, wooden craft items and block printed products were the most purchased products under the “Amazon Karigar” scheme.
“I look at every Diwali as a learning experience. Even this Diwali, right up front, we had a few technical glitches. We had scaled, the demand was so high that there were some issues in terms of people not being able to shop at one point. You get surprised every year. So, yes, you learn from that,” adds Nanda.
