- Strong performance by new categories like gaming accessories, travel accessories and health devices
- Beauty & makeup products, dietary foods, healthy snacks & supplements, kids apparel as well as kitchenware were the other highlights during this year’s festive season sales
- Tier 3 towns trump Tier 2 cities with higher volumes
New Delhi: The festive season sale 2024 has wrapped up on a positive note, with order volumes higher by over 14% YoY. The period also witnesseda GMV growth of over 18% compared to the Diwali sales in 2023.
Analysis by Unicommerce, one of India’s leading e-commerce enablement SaaS platforms, highlights that while the entire sale period presented multiple purchase opportunities, most of the buying happened during the initial days of the season sale. Exciting discounts offered continued throughout the month-long sale event, including sales for Navratri, Dussehra, Dhanteras and Diwali followed by Govardhan puja and Bhai Dooj.
Based on the analysis of orders processed on Unicommerce’s platform, relatively new e-commerce categories that were the top performers this year included travel accessories and health devices which noted a significant over 100% YoY order volume growth for each category. The gaming accessories segment also witnessed a remarkable over 85% YoY order volume growth during this period.
Other traditional categories which made a strong impression this festive season were beauty & makeup products with a whopping over 100% order volume growth this season as compared to the previous year. Toys & baby products and kids apparel also recorded higher order volumes with over 50% and 30% YoY growth respectively. Dietary foods, healthy snacks & supplements as well as kitchenware products noted over 40% and 30% order volume growth respectively during this period as compared to the festive sale last year.
Tier III cities and beyond areas outperformed tier II towns with higher market share of 36.4% in terms of order volumes as compared to that of tier II towns which stood at 23.5%. The market share of tier I cities and metropolitans was however the highest this year at 40.1%.
Brands and e-commerce companies continue to tackle order returns with the help of technology as the festive rush puts a greater load of orders on these platforms. Some of the categories that saw reduction in order returns this year were electronics & gaming accessories where returns fell from 20.5% in 2023 to 16% in 2024. The Books segment also noted reduced returns which accounted for 14% in 2023 and were down to 11.5% in 2024. The travel accessories category also saw a decrease in order returns from 20.2% in 2023 to 18% in 2024.
E-commerce sale events continue beyond the festive season sale, with many more upcoming sales, including the Black Friday Sale, Christmas Sale and the Year-end Sale.
About Unicommerce eSolutions Limited:
Incorporated in 2012, Unicommerce is an e-commerce enablement Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) platform that enables end-to-end management of e-commerce operations for brands, sellers and logistics service provider firms. Unicommerce enables businesses to efficiently manage their entire journey of post-purchase e-commerce operations through a comprehensive product suite that includes warehouse and inventory management, multi-channel order management, omni-channel retail management, a seller management dashboard for marketplaces, and the newly launched UniShip, UniReco, and UniGPT. These products aid in streamlining e-commerce operations for the company’s clients and enables Unicommerce to become a critical part of the supply chain stack of its clients.
Unicommerce’s comprehensive suite of SaaS products acts as the nerve centre for e-commerce fulfilment operations for businesses and allows them to manage inventory across multiple locations, minimize fulfilment costs, process orders for multiple online and offline channels, manage returns, generate correct invoices, reconcile order payments, shipment tracking for customers, taxation and other regulatory compliances. The company’s product suite is sector and size-agnostic and designed to meet the business needs of various types and sizes of retail and e-commerce enterprises, both online and offline.
