The Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF)- 2014 started on 10th December 2014 for a three-day long never-seen-before shopping frenzy. Over 450 ecommerce websites participated in the festival, to sell products ranging from food, fashion, electronics, home decor and even real estate. The three-day event was a huge success, with Google reporting over 1.4 CRORE visits to its site throughout GOSF. The three days not only delighted shoppers with some amazing deals but also gave the Indian ecommerce industry a edge to scale their business to the next level. To mark the beginning of GOSF in 2014, Google and its partners started pre-festival celebrations (from Dec 9) and launched contests, games and surprise gifts to get greater response. This year, the merchant sites, the marketplace sellers and The big-daddy Google, all were well-prepared to stand steady under the sheer weight of massive numbers, thus giving shoppers a bump-free ride.
Maximum Hits: The 299 corner
This amazing offers at the 299 store won the highest number of fans for GOSF 2014. Due to this scheme, many first-time shoppers got the confidence to shop online as the money involved is not a big risk. Be it fashion apparels, shoes, watches, soft toys, sunglasses, cookware, home decor items, kitchen appliances, almost everything was up for grabs at this small sum. Interestingly, most websites provided free shipping.
The Big Bag Winners:
The top websites in terms of transactions were Shopclues.com, eBay.in, Snapdeal.com, Amazon.in, Domino’s & BookMyShow by the ascending order. The Top websites in terms of revenue were Snapdeal, Ebay.in, Shopclues, Amazon.in, Dominos, and Infibeam. The cities where most of the transactions originated from were Bangalore, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Gurgaon, Ahmedabad & Noida. Top 3 Metros were Delhi, Banglore and Mumbai.
Top 3 categories were Electronics and Mobile, Fashion and Travel.
Biggest Winner Google :
GOSF 2014 has clocked more than 7 million unique visitors as compared to 2 million visitors in the year 2013 on Google. The idea behind the inception of GOSF in the year 2012 was to encourage more people to shop online. With the increasing traction which GOSF is seeing year on year, it is a clear sign that GOSF is going to give greater number next year with much more business to more merchants.
Amazing Platform for Offline Players:
Offline retailers till now were cautious of the growing clout of ecommerce industry suddenly realized that they could immensely benefit by adopting the hybrid medium of online and offline retail. A lot of offline retailers benefited from GOSF 2014. The biggest example was Tata Realty which bagged around 10000 flat bookings in a matter of just one day and Purvankara booked 125 homes on the first day itself. Yes, even you should think of going online at the earliest.
Losers :
Flipkart was focusing on its own Big App Shopping Days for them, and missed out on the greater bulk of customers, who still prefer making online purchases on desktops and laptops. Although Flipkart was able to get greater numbers of its application on the customers mobile but it was a big loss for the company by not taking the advantage of GOSF.
Win- Win Situation :
Most of the small merchants on various websites who gave exciting deals from 30% to 95% Off , got the maximum revenue and generate greater sales online like never before. However, as the greater numbers of merchants are going online everyday, the competition is becoming tougher. The merchants with the best deals will survive. It has become extremely critical to have the presence of the business on the Internet, if one wishes to scale it big.
For most of the winners of GOSF the sales went up 2X on the third day of the shopping festival. The sales period after GOSf reduced drastically because most of the deals were over and disposable income of the buyers were exhausted. According to Google, the GOSF 2014 has been a bigger hit than expected. Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India said that the sale has surprised his “wildest expectations”, with awesome user traffic. It was indeed a roaring success to many websites but a loss to some.
