The Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF) hosted by Google this year is said to have been a blazing success thanks to mobile phones being used to shop and higher participation by those living in small cities across India. The three-day shopping fete is supposed to have attracted almost 80 lakh visitors to the site.
Roughly 40 percent of users navigated to the GOSF portal on their mobile devices. A lot of shoppers came from smaller urban areas like Bareilly, Firozpur, Guntur, Hubli and Ranchi. With 450 sellers having joined the list of participating retailers, the entire promotion period is said to have earned more than 1.4 crore visitors to the website.
Google India Industry Director eCommerce, Nitin Bawankule, pointed out that the ‘Rs 299 corner’ was the most popular among first time buyers. Smaller vendors reported an increase of 5 to 7 times in their conversion rates, says a post on The Financial Express which refers to PTI for the story. Products falling under the electronics, home and kitchen as well as lifestyle categories pulled in a huge number of buyers.
GOSF 2014 did not have just deliverable items on sale. Shoppers were also spotted booking more than 500 houses, 50 cars and 100 bikes. But the online fest which was marked by discounts and offers, didn’t only sell an extremely high number of items. Rohan Bhargava, co-founder of CashKaro, a website specializing in cash-back and coupons, notes that the average retail value of orders also doubled as pitted against regular days.
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Google’s GOSF which is held every year, witnessed participation from 220 cities and enjoyed up to seven times higher user engagement as compared to last year’s 20 lakh visits. 2014’s numbers just prove that the e-commerce market in India is booming like nobody’s business.