Amazon's flagship festive sale, the Great Indian Festival 2023 saw 110 crore customer visits, the highest ever the platform has seen. The sale also recorded highest ever transactions, new launches, orders, and savings than any previous year, the e-commerce platform said in a statement. The sale, which started on October 8, ran for a month before it officially concludes on November 10.

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Sharing statistics of the interview, Amazon said the sale also received highest single day of Prime sign-ups in the first 48 hours, with more than 65% of Prime members who shopped during the festive season, being from tier 2 & 3 cities/towns.

While over 40 lakh new customers shopped for the first time, 80% of new customers for Amazon India came from tier 2 and below towns with the platform delivering at least one order to more than 19,000+ pin-codes pan India.

Smartphone & consumer electronics

Amazon says that it sold 2.5x more premium smartphones as compared to last year, driven by affordability options such as No Cost EMI and Exchange offers. Amongst all smartphones sold, 60% were 5G ready and 70% of all smartphones orders came from Tier 2 and below towns.

It also claims that it saw an all-time high in sales for large-screen TVs (55 inches & above) recording over 50% higher sales than 2022, while for Consumer Electronics and Personal computing, 3 out of 5 orders came from tier 2 and 3 cities. AC led the growth for the appliances category with 2x growth vs rest of the appliances.

Premiumisation drives sales

Amazon says premium products saw a Spike in Demand with the highest ever demand observed for categories like jewelry, premium smartwatches where new launches grew at almost 5x and in appliances too, over 45% of the customers chose to upgrade to premium appliances.

Luxury beauty category also witnessed up to 8x spike with increased demand for international brands within fragrances, professional beauty.

However, what drove sales of premium products was the fact that most consumers opted for financing options to upgrade. Amazon says 1 out of 4 purchases were made on EMI, while 3 out of 4 products were sold on No Cost EMIs and Amazon Pay Later usage was 2.4x vs last year, with EMI share doubling as Amazon expanded credit to INR 1 lakh.

"Over 70% of customers made use of affordability options such as INR 99 per day offer to upgrade their home to leading brands Samsung, LG, Daikin, Haier etc," it added.

As a result of high sales, sellers too, Amazon says, saw massive increase in business. Over 38,000 sellers achieved their highest-ever single-day sales. Over 750 sellers made sales worth crores and 31,000 sellers worth lakhs this festive season, Amazon said.

“We also saw the highest ever Prime sign ups in a single day this season along with the highest seller participation along with 5,000 new launches from top brands. A heartfelt thank you to our customers, brand and bank partners, sellers, and delivery associates, for making this the biggest celebration ever in the history of our operations in India” said Manish Tiwary, Country Manager, India Consumer Business, Amazon.