Amazon India has geared up for the upcoming festive season. Its Great Indian Festival will start from September 29 and will end on October 4. Claiming to have never-seen-before deals by lakhs of sellers on the widest selection of smartphones, laptops, cameras, large appliances & TVs, home & kitchen products, fashion, consumables such as grocery & beauty and consumer electronics, Amazon has tied up with various banking partners to make purchases affordable.
Manish Tiwary, Vice President – Category Management, Amazon India says, “Amazon’s Great Indian Festival is important for us to bring in the next 100 million customers online, many of them from Tier-III or even Tier-IV towns. #AmazonFestiveYatra represents a microcosm of this experience and our continued efforts to engage and understand our customers.”
Amazon India has flagged off the Amazon Festive Yatra – a unique ‘house-on-wheels’ featuring a large variety of products available on Amazon India. Amazon has created three special tucks into a house that will cross 13 cities covering over 6,000 kms throughout the festive season starting from New Delhi and ending in Bengaluru.
“We had a very good season last year. We are very bullish about this season. We just announced the SBI cashback. Along with that, you will also have an extended warranty offer on Amazon for large appliances. Our delivery experience has been improvised to be bigger and better than last year. From a slowdown standpoint, I can only tell that we haven’t seen a slowdown. A large part of what is online is also a very small part of the overall pie right now for us for macroeconomic conditions to impact us. This might take many more years,” says Suchit Subhas, Director – Large Appliances & Furniture, Amazon India.
Commenting upon the sales, Subhas adds, “the purchases consumers make during these days are a part of festive celebration. 25 to 30 per cent of the industry sales happen during the festival. We have been growing at around 1.5x year-on-year. We have more than 5000 products on their sites in large appliances. Out of that, thousand new products are being added just in preparation for the sale.”
Amazon did a consumer study for appliances to understand the key pain-points and questions of consumers. One of the key learnings from the study is having all the selection under one roof so that consumers don’t have to go to multiple stores. The second is that large home appliances are high ticket purchases, so affordability becomes the key. One of the two purchases in large appliances happen on EMI. And half of that happens on the low-cost EMI, which is zero-cost EMI. For this, Amazon is offering a wide range of finance options including no-cost EMI on debit and credit cards, 10 per cent instant bank discount on SBI debit and credit cards, exchange offers and more. Besides, there will be special ‘festive cashback offers’ wherein customers can start collecting up to Rs 900 worth of offers by visiting the Great India Festival event page on Amazon.in.
For understanding technical details about the product, Amazon has also introduced dedicated pre-purchase support. It is like a virtual salesman in this category – trained by big brands on their latest technologies. Consumers can call them to understand what they are looking for. Lastly, short-delivery time and installation are key for shopping at Amazon. There are additional features such as scheduled delivery both from a speed and quality standpoint.
“One of the features that Amazon launched last year was ‘Open Box’ for all our customers because we know customers trust us to buy something online. And we want to ensure that we are in the proper condition. It was there in six cities last year and we have expanded it across 26 cities this year,” adds Subhas.
The online marketplace has partnered with hundreds of leading brands, enabled over 500,000 sellers to sell on Amazon.in, and expanded fulfillment footprint with more than 50 fulfillment centers in 13 states offering a storage capacity of over 20 million cubic feet..
[“source=businesstoday”]
