Two years ago, technology giant Google, took the internet by storm with the Indian version of ‘Cyber Monday–Great Online Shopping Festival’ to encourage Indians to shop online by offering discounts and deals across categories.
However, Google India today announced on its official blog that it is discontinuing its ‘Great Online Shopping Festival’ (GOSF) from this year.
“Today, India has many flourishing and successful e-commerce companies and there are multiple deal days being hosted by various e-tailers delivering great value to shoppers across India,”Nitin Bawankule,Google India Industry Director (E-commerce, Local and Classified) wrote in a blog.
“Users don’t have to wait for 12 months to get the best deals online, small and medium businesses no longer have to wait for www.gosf.in to find customers from all across India,” he added.
The three-day shopping festival by Google, launched in 2012, helped large eCommerce players get massive transactions; it served as a great platform for hundreds of small and medium businesses to find customers across India. Many small and medium eCommerce portals used GOSF as a launch platform and saw phenomenal growth in sales and some of them today are well established online shopping destinations.
In the maiden edition of GOSF, Google saw over 90 retailers participating and traffic from over 5,00,000 points. This grew to over 240 retailers and 2 million in traffic in 2013 and further to more than 550 retailers and 14 million in traffic last year.
“In 2012, India had 130 million Internet users with only 8 million Indians shopping online, and the total online shopping industry was approximately USD 2 billion. Fast forward to 2015, India has over 350 million Internet users and over 50 million online shoppers projected to reach 100 million by 2016 and the industry is already over USD 10 billion,” Bawankule points out.
“We will continue to invest in initiatives to empower small and medium businesses and work along with the industry to make Internet a growth engine for the country,” he added.
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