Amazon India expects record festive sales; electronics, fashion leading the way

Amazon India is capitalising on the festive shopping spirit with its biggest online event, the Great Indian Festival, achieving unprecedented sales this year,  according to Manish Tiwary, the Country Manager of the India Consumer Business.

“I would sort of say with some confidence that this will definitely be the biggest event we have ever seen. Again, what our seller and brand partners are saying is that for almost all of them  -- I am yet to hear an exception -- it promises to be the highest ever day for them,” Tiwary said in an interview with CNBC-TV18 on Day 1 of the Amazon Great Indian Festival.

The annual online festive sales kicked off in India early this month with discounts and deals across Flipkart, Amazon, Myntra, Meesho, etc. Redseer has estimated that this festive season could shore up sales worth Rs 90,000 crore, especially after e-commerce sales saw some historic sales in the past few quarters on account of macroeconomic headwinds.

“The good news is we are hearing some great success stories from some of our big brand partners in electronics. We are hearing the same from some of our partners in fashion and luggage. There were some special deals a lot of grocery brands and sellers did, Re 1 deals. They have been super-duper successful,” Tiwary said.

Days after Flipkart launched its VIP subscription program to take on Amazon Prime, Amazon has launched a limited variant of its Prime membership called Prime Shopping Edition for Rs 399 a year.

Tiwary said, “We are super excited with the progress the Prime Program has made in India. It's one of the fastest-growing locales for Prime members across the world. There are a lot of work and experiments we keep on doing for Prime. But overall, we are super excited about the way it's moving. And even today, if you look at it more than half of our Prime customers actually come from smaller towns.”