Meesho trumps Amazon in festive sale order volumes, Flipkart Group leads market

The e-commerce pecking order has been altered. Bharat-focused online marketplace Meesho has surpassed Amazon in festive sale order volumes this year, emerging as the second-largest player after Flipkart Group. Meesho’s share of orders in the festive sales pie stood at 21 per cent, while Flipkart Group platforms led the market with a 49 per cent share.

“It’s interesting to see a new platform emerging in the second position in terms of order volumes,” said Ujjwal Chaudhry, Partner, RedSeer Strategy Consultants. “Meesho fulfilled 100 per cent of its orders through third-party logistics (3PL) players because it doesn’t have a captive [logistics] arm like Flipkart Group and Amazon,” he added.

In terms of Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV), though, Flipkart Group and Amazon occupied the top two positions, with 62 per cent and 26 per cent shares, respectively. Meesho’s share in GMV was expectedly lower because of its low average ticket sizes given the platform’s value commerce offering. Meesho, however, continues to be a strong driver of growth from Tier 2+ cities.

In a recent interaction with Business Today, Meesho shared that it had minted over 20,000 lakhpati sellers in its five-day sale. Additionally, ~60 per cent of its orders came from Tier 4+ regions.  “Our seller registrations grew 3x over last year, and all categories grew exponentially, with some like fashion and kitchen utilities seeing non-linear jumps,” Utkrishta Kumar, CXO - Business at Meesho, told BT.

Amazon, meanwhile, has issued a statement refuting RedSeer numbers. "We cannot comment on speculative reports without robust and transparent methodology especially as these have not been shared with us," an Amazon India spokesperson told Business Today. 

Amazon further added that it had "witnessed the highest ever start to the Great Indian Festival Sale 2022 in the first 48 hours, with 8X sales as compared to the average business days".

Two-third shoppers from Tier 2 cities

Overall, the festive sales this year saw 75-80 million online shoppers, up 24 per cent from a year ago. Tier 2+ customers made up a whopping 65 per cent of shoppers this year. According to RedSeer estimates, in the period between September 22-30, e-commerce platforms clocked a GMV of $5.7 billion (or Rs 40,000 crore). This was 27 per cent higher than last year’s festive sales. However, spend per shopper went up only marginally by 3 per cent.

From a category perspective, mobiles continued to lead GMV with a 41 per cent share. About 56,000 phones were sold every hour, RedSeer revealed.  Fashion was next, with a 20 per cent share of overall GMV. “Fashion emerged pretty strong and was the highest-growth category this year. One of the reasons was because people went out more compared to in 2021,” Chaudhry explained.

Electronics and large appliances were the other best-selling categories, growing 5.2x over average daily sales. “While the beginning of the last quarter was slow on demand, we saw a good uptick in consumer sentiment and consumption patterns in late August and September. This we expect will further lead to demand recovery in the build-up to Diwali,” RedSeer stated.

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