As September arrives, India comes alive with a series of festivals. A time of celebration and cherished memories. The most popular pick? Of course, Dusshera and Diwali. This is a season of gifting, prompting customers to seek the best value for their loved ones. However, it is equally important for the brand or retailer to maintain margins, keep inventory in check, and ensure enhanced customer satisfaction. Position yourself as a customer and think of all the deals, offers, and promotions you would want to grab during the eCommerce sales. Customers these days don’t prefer going out for shopping; instead, they find it easier to shop online at their convenience.
During the peak event season, online traffic reaches a record high. As the number of online orders grows, so does the need to ensure that first-time buyers, your regular customers, vendors, and all involved have a seamless experience. This blog post presents you with a microscopic view of the eCommerce market in India and a winning eCommerce business strategy for you to enter the marketplace with a structural approach.
The two biggest online marketplaces in India celebrate Diwali with enormous pomp and ceremony. Operating an online store involves recognising that there are two distinct paths to pursue, and it becomes clear that challenging conditions may arise in the face of intense competition. All you need to do is start preparing early. With the year’s biggest sales approaching (Amazon’s ‘The Great Indian Festival’ and Flipkart’s ‘Big Billion Days’).
Let’s first look at the numbers for the 2023 success and how you can reap benefits from participating in this season. During Flipkart’s biggest sales event, “The Big Billion Days” (TBD) 2023, a record 1.4 billion people visited the site. On the other hand, the Amazon Great Indian Festival 2023 witnessed a record of 110 crore customer visits, making it the highest ever.
Table of Contents
Festive eCommerce Strategies: Decoding Consumer Behaviour
Identifying consumer behaviour solves half the mystery. But how do you do it? With the right resources and team backing you up, you can decode some imperative FAQs like
- How do consumers begin their research?
The consumers usually begin their research on search engines by looking for the specific product, which leads them to marketplaces like Amazon, Flipkart, Zepto, Blinkit, etc.
- How have consumer spending habits evolved?
Some people prefer to pay more attention to the quality over the cost, while some consider cost to be the most important factor.
- Their preferred payment method.
Convenience is the key here. How ? There are multiple payment options available in the form of UPIs, cash-on-delivery, netbanking, credit, or debit cards. However, customers prefer the one that is most feasible for them at the given point in time.
- Do they prefer additional discounts over the ongoing ones?
Discounts, deals, and coupons are the best way to make your customers stay loyal to your brands. Giving an additional 5% discount on the UPI payment method, along with the ongoing promotions, can spike up your sales.
- Do they prefer individual products or like the bundled ones?
Again, this depends on the needs of the hour. But if you are offering discounts on certain products, for example, an XYZ lip balm at Rs 1, if the cart value exceeds 600 INR, then there are high chances that he or she may add products to match up the value of the cart. Another example can be taken here: bundling miscellar water with cotton wipes has high chances of getting sold as the products complement each other.
During the festive season, consumer spending is usually twice as high as usual, and it is important to acquire all the must-knows beforehand to be able to draft the right eCommerce strategies for the festive sales season.
Winning eCommerce Strategies for Sellers for Festive Season 2024
- Planning and stocking up on your inventory
It is vital to plan and stock up on inventory for the festive seasons. This ensures that you are prepared ahead of time for a shopping spree. Also, analysing previous sales performances and trends can aid in keeping track of your inventory. It provides an insight into the must-have/bestselling products to be stocked in advance.
Online retailers thrive when they have the right inventory available at the right time. Since sales are usually in large volumes, sellers should prepare in advance for the immediate surge in demand during the feasting season. With the right stock of best-selling products on hand, you can fulfil and ship orders as fast as possible. As a result, your customers can enjoy a seamless shopping experience with this service enhancement.
Inventory Check ft.Paxcom’s Digital Shelf Analytics Tool
With Paxcom’s digital shelf analytics tool, Kinator, you can easily plan your purchase and inventory levels based on past performance and seasonal trends. This gives you a favourable indication of what products to keep in stock throughout the year.
However, if you are still fretting about your inventory, Amazon and Flipkart have their fulfilment centres, and if you are an FBA seller. There is nothing to be worried about. You can send your SKUs ahead of time, and the fulfilment centres will process and store them for you.
- Take a quick glance at your competitors’ performance.
Analysing your competition enables you to identify areas for improvement and refine your strategies and product offerings. Competitor analysis garners key information about the category and product’s market share. This data can be used to run keyword research as
To gain a competitive advantage, it is important to use trending keywords and optimise your listings. A rigorous analysis helps to formulate strategies better, ensuring everything is covered.
- Preparing for the eCommerce Festive Rush: Optimising Listings & Conversions
To prepare for the traffic stampede, make sure all traffic reaches your page and converts. You need to ensure that all your listings are filled with festive-related search terms, and the above competitor analysis you performed can now come in handy for you. Here are some of the steps you should take to beautify your listing as part of your eCommerce business strategy.
- Update your images with holiday-themed ones. Make sure the primary images show off the festive vibes and that it is of utmost importance to add multiple packshots and lifestyle images of festive packaging.
Source:Amazon
- As a Brand Registry member, you can use the Brand Analytics tools to determine which keywords were searched during the shopping season last year for your product or a competitor’s product. Adding top-performing keywords will lead to conversions. Add festive keywords throughout your listing: “Diwali,” “last-minute gifts,” “Diwali celebrations.”
Strategic Keyword Placement in Product Titles. Source: Amazon
- Ensure that your product descriptions and highlights are filled with all the relevant information and integrated keywords. As the traction will be higher during the holiday season and you don’t want to miss your customers due to the lack of information.
Integrate keywords in Product Features. Source: Amazon
Pro Tip: Start early with the listing and optimising process and reap the benefits.
- Personalisation & Customer Engagement
Customers crave attention and importance; this is where personalisation enters the rim. Did you know that Optimonk revealed, “83% of people are willing to give up their information for a more personalised experience?” Meanwhile, 74% of Gen Zers are interested in personalised products (vs. 67% of Millennials, 61% of Gen Xers, and 57% of Baby Boomers).
Personalised coupons, deals, and discounts allow brands to stand out in the competition. A seamless and personalised customer experience plays a critical role throughout. Customers love tailored experiences, and this leaves a significant impact on their preferences and behaviour. A successful customer engagement strategy includes targeted promotions, frequent communications, follow-ups, and product recommendations, along with seamless checkout, return/exchange options, and last but not least, free shipping options.
- Get creative with the deals!
Both the Amazon and Flipkart platforms may have different terminology for the deals they offer. But one thing that remains constant is the consumers’ love for bargain deals.
Here’s a peek at Amazon’s Great Indian Festival deals for 2024.
Both the Amazon and Flipkart platforms may have different terminology for the deals they offer. But one thing that doesn’t change is consumers’ love for bargain deals. You don’t believe us? According to a poll done by the market research company Ipsos Research for Amazon India. A total of 71% of those who answered said they were going to shop online this holiday season, and 89% were excited about the upcoming celebrations. So, now you know the importance of creating coupons and deals of the day, discounts, and whatnot. Suppose you are creating coupons or discounts. Deals. Ensure that you create them a couple of weeks before the big holiday event arises.
Here’s a peek at Flipkart’s The Big Billion Days for 2024
Bonus Strategy: Leveraging Social Commerce
Social media is unavoidable, and as a brand, it becomes increasingly important to build your brand’s image and presence online. Peak season brings a lot of opportunities to elevate your brand’s visibility across all the social media platforms and eCommerce marketplaces. D2C brands can use this time to build strong customer relationships and even launch their products on the marketplaces and advertise on social media to create hype and impart knowledge to their customers.
Adjusting your Advertising Campaign Budgets.
Not to spoil your fun with talking about budgets and calculations, but this step is one of the most important, since “Big Billion Days” and “Great Indian Festivals” account for the significant increase in traffic. Start with conservative bids in late September, ramp up in early October, and push aggressive budgets around key dates like Dhanteras. As customer traffic increases, PPC advertising becomes more competitive, so it’s time to adopt a competitive keyword bidding strategy as well.
Optimise your budgets for the Great Indian Festival using the budget rule of Amazon Advertising Services. You can set the campaign budget prior to the D-day, or you can use performance-based rules to increase sponsored product ads campaign budgets when your campaigns meet certain performance thresholds, including advertising cost per sale (ACOS), click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate (CR).
For Flipkart Big Billion Days, you can try creating campaigns with a daily budget option for better performance control, or a total budget option with a start and end date. Extend the end date beyond the event or use “Equally divide budget for all days.” When your daily spend average is reached, the campaign ends.
To summarise, with the increase in holiday traffic, your daily budget may disappear faster than usual because you’ll get more clicks. Ensure that your advertising account has a sufficient balance. During this period, brands are expected to spend nearly 50% to 55% of the total annual ad expenditure (adex), estimated between₹1.1 lakh crore and₹1.5 lakh crore. Therefore, raising your daily budget may be necessary if your ads are currently running profitably. If you find your daily budget is being eaten up before the end of the day, increase it incrementally until you find that your ads can now run effectively.
Get to grips with your Keyword Bidding.
We all know how the saying goes: go big or go home. During this festive season, as more and more sellers start to advertise products on Amazon, unlike you think, the bids you currently have will not suffice. A lot of competitors have probably upped their bids as well. Depending on your products, bid competitively, specifically on highly relevant, top-performing, non-negotiable keywords, to win as many impressions as possible.
What is the Importance of Executing Advertising Campaigns?
It is a must to be visible to your customers during the festive season and cut out all the noise; Amazon Sponsored Ads and Flipkart Search Ads can be very helpful. Customise your banner ads with a catchy tagline such as “product-related + holiday-related” to garner customers’ attention. Test all kinds of ads; now is not the time to hide behind only one type of ad. It is also advised to add all relevant brand, generic, and competition keywords to multiple campaigns to broaden the traffic base.
Although display and video ads are recently gaining a lot of attention, when a customer is looking for products and lands upon a video, that will certainly gauge the customer’s attention, especially if it puts you into their consideration stage. During the peak, festive ads drive conversions with display ads. You can retarget the ads to the customers who viewed your products and with search ads through native placements. This will give you a massive leg-up on the competitors who are not running these eCommerce-sponsored ads.
Remember to constantly check all your keywords and advertisements’ performance, since this field is highly competitive. You’ve heard the saying, “You snooze, you lose!”.
This image represents examples of Amazon’s Great Indian Festival deals
This image represents examples of Flipkart’s Big Billion Days deals.
Be ready for the Inevitable Product Returns
Product returns are inevitable; they are just a part of the business. While many sellers expect that October will be the busiest year ever in terms of sales, they tend to forget that returned items can also become the cause of sleepless nights. In summary, it’s also a significant step of your eCommerce business strategy to be aware of and check your return policy to ensure smooth sailing.
Unlocking Festive Strategies for Q-Commerce
- The number of Rakhi orders at Swiggy Instamart increased five times from last year, while the number of chocolate orders increased fifty percent compared to a normal day.
- The platform has already sold four times as many rakhis (2024) as last year (2023), according to Zepto cofounder Kaivalya V.
- Albinder Dhindsa, CEO of Blinkit, announced on X that the company was selling 693 rakhis per minute.
Quick Commerce platforms are on roll and appear as the most convenient option when the customers are running out of time. The above statistics are only a reference, and punched orders go beyond the stated numbers during the peak festive season. During the climax, this list of festive strategies can help you boost conversions.
5 Festive Strategies for Quick Commerce
1. Leverage freebies and exclusive offers.
- Offering freebies or gifts with purchase during festive campaigns helps drive larger basket sizes and improves conversion rates, especially in Quick Commerce. Indian consumers look for extra value during festivals like Diwali and Dussehra.
- In Diwali 2023, Quick Commerce platforms like Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart reported a 35% increase in average order value when offering free gifts such as sweets and festive decor items.
2. Promote upselling and cross-selling in Quick Commerce
- During festive seasons, platforms can push upselling and cross-selling strategies to maximise cart value. Recommend complementary products like festive snacks or home decor when users are about to checkout.
“Cross-selling during checkout helped Quick Commerce platforms generate 15-20% higher sales per transaction in the 2023 festive season.”
3. Use cart injections to boost conversions.
- Cart injections—adding limited-time deals at the last checkout stage creates urgency and increases impulse buys. Quick Commerce thrives on speed and impulse purchases, and a festive cart injection can boost conversions further.
- Blinkit’s 2023 Diwali flash sale on last-minute Diwali gifts (like diyas and sweets) increased conversion rates by 25% when using cart injections, especially on orders made just before Diwali.
4. Themed Packaging to Create Festive Appeal
- Custom-themed packaging can significantly influence buying decisions, especially during high-emotion festivals like Diwali and Dussehra. Quick Commerce brands can offer limited-edition packaging to make their products more attractive and gift-ready.
- During Diwali 2023, Cadbury and other FMCG brands introduced special festive packaging, leading to 30 million units sold. Quick Commerce platforms that featured these products saw a 25% higher purchase intent for these items.
5. Timely Quick Commerce Ad Campaigns with Festive Keywords
Effective ad campaigns leveraging keywords like “Diwali Quick Commerce delivery,” “Last-minute festive offers,” and “Fast delivery for Dussehra” can drive significant engagement during the festive season.
- Swiggy Instamart and Zepto saw a 40% higher click-through rate (CTR) in 2023 by running well-timed festive campaigns starting two weeks before Diwali and peaking on key days like Dhanteras and Lakshmi Puja.
- During Diwali 2023, Quick Commerce platforms that optimised their campaigns with festive keywords and time-sensitive offers reported a 35-40% increase in traffic and conversions during the festive week.
Accomplishing Heights with Paxcom
As the title suggests, if you’re proactive with your pre-preparation, you will be well on your path towards a higher conversion rate, visibility, and discoverability. Remember, data is your best friend. Keep track of your and your competitors’ performance. Our eCommerce experts can assist you at every stage of the eCommerce process, from out-of-stock data custom alerts, content planning, allocating budgets, and running advertising campaigns.
We hope that the above-mentioned step-by-step eCommerce business strategy will be helpful for you. If you still feel stuck, feel free to reach out to us at info@paxcom.net.
