Sellers on Flipkart celebrate encouraging customer response

Flipkart’s app-only ‘Big Billion Sale’ this year was a real celebration for sellers on its platform, who witnessed a considerable jump in sales. Home furnishings seller Indian Weave Sourcing for instance, that shut its Panipat store to sell exclusively online, sold goods worth Rs one crore during the sale event. The company was among 500 sellers on Flipkart who reportedly witnessed sales of over Rs 10 lakh in the October 13-17, 2015 sale period.

Some sellers managed to go beyond their annual targets during the five days. While car accessories store Carsmith from Aurangabad sold goods worth Rs 1.2 crore, equivalent to its annual offline sales target, Surat-based Ahmedabad Cotton saw its volumes increase that compensated the low margins due to high discounts.

Flipkart, which was heavily criticised for its inability to handle the crowd last year, claims to have sold 10 lakh products on October 13, 2015 in the first 10 hours of 'The Big Billion Days' five-day sale event. The highest traffic on the Flipkart website was drawn from cities like Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai along with Tier II towns such as Ludhiana, Lucknow and Bhopal.

The company boasts of over 42,000 sellers on its platform. The company offers facilities such as training, services by ecommerce partners and help to get working capital loans from non-banking finance companies to its sellers. Flipkart has set a target of reaching 10 billion dollars (over Rs 64,000 crores) in gross merchandise value in 2016 and reaching 100 billion dollars by 2020 (Rs six lakh crores).