Amazon sold Rs 750 Cr worth of smartphones on Day 1 of festival sale

Amazon kicked off its Great Indian Festival sale over the weekends and said it had seen its "biggest over opening." Amazon claims to have sold premium smartphones worth Rs 750 crore within 36 hours of starting the sale on its platform. Apparently, there's been a massive uptick in the number of premium smartphones being sold on the e-commerce platform, as expected. According to reports, e-commerce companies including Amazon could make close to 5 billion dollars worth of sale this festive season. The ongoing sale is to close on October 4.

Commenting on the ongoing sale, Amazon's Global SVP and India Country Head Amit Agarwal had this to say:

"With the single largest day of Prime sign-ups, and record number of customer and seller participation, this is the biggest opening day sale for Amazon.in," said Agarwal.

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Spike from tier II, tier III towns

Agarwal added that 91 per cent of Amazon's new customers came from tier II and III towns. During the sale so far, categories like fashion and smartphone have emerged as the top shopping categories for these customers. Amazon also sale said a large number of customers were coming to the e-commerce platform through the Hindi interface that it launched last year.

"Affordability programmes enabled record number of customers upgrade to premium phones with sales from premium brands OnePlus, Samsung and Apple exceeding Rs 750 crore within 36 hours. Large appliances and TVs saw record sales over the 36 hours with nearly 10X from an average business day," Agarwal pointed out.

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Agarwal also added fashion category saw a five times growth on Amazon. Meanwhile, categories such as beauty and groceries saw seven times and 3.5 times growth, respectively. Agarwal was talking about the response Amazon received on the first day of its Great Indian Festival compared to usual business days.  Much like its customers, Agarwal said about half of its sellers were from tier II or lower cities, and more than 42,500 sellers received at least one customer order in the first 36 hours of the sale.

(With PTI inputs)