India sees $5.7 bn worth online festive sales, 56k mobiles sold per hour

The online retail platforms in India clocked $5.7 billion (about Rs 40,000 crore) worth festive sales between September 22 to 30, a robust 27 per cent (year-on-year) growth, a report showed on Thursday.

Mobile phones continue to lead the market with 41 per cent contribution in gross merchandise value (GMV) and nearly 56,000 mobile handsets were sold every hour, according to the report by market research firm Redseer Strategy Consultants. A whopping 75-80 million shoppers placed orders across all platforms in the first week of festive sales.

Shopper base also increased by 24 per cent (on-year) in the first week of festive sale, with 65 per cent of shoppers coming from Tier 2 and cities. Flipkart Group (Flipkart, Myntra and Shopsy) continued to lead the market with 62 per cent market share in GMV, while Meesho emerged second largest in terms of order volume (21 per cent of the market share).

"Mobile as a category continued to lead GMV share, contributing to 41 per cent of the GMV, translating to 56,000 mobiles sold per hour. On the other hand, fashion contributed to 20 per cent of GMV, which grew 48 per cent YoY from the last festive sale period," said Sanjay Kothari, Associate Partner, Redseer Strategy Consultants.

Moreover, the spend per online shopper increased marginally by 3 per cent during the festive week, the report mentioned. In the first four days of the first festive sales, e-commerce platforms in India clocked over Rs 24,500 crore (nearly $3.5 billion).

Nearly 55 million shoppers made online purchases during the first four days as overall daily average gross merchandise value (GMV) rose to 5.4 times. Bengaluru-based Redseer has predicted $11.8 billion worth gross merchandise value (GMV) during the entire festive month up to Diwali.