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Business News/ Industry / Retail/  E-retailers introduce Indians to Thanksgiving with deep discounts
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E-retailers introduce Indians to Thanksgiving with deep discounts

Websites such as eBay and Junglee, dangled day-long discounts of up to 80% across various categories on Friday

EBay India, which ran a Black Friday campaign from 21 November to 28 November, received orders for three times the imported goods it received in the previous week. Photo: BloombergPremium
EBay India, which ran a Black Friday campaign from 21 November to 28 November, received orders for three times the imported goods it received in the previous week. Photo: Bloomberg

New Delhi: Indians may not be culturally attuned to celebrating Thanksgiving, but this year e-commerce websites are offering discount-hungry online shoppers attractive promotional deals and inventory from markets such as the US and the UK, themed around the day to boost sales, introducing customers to the festival.

Websites such as eBay, Junglee, ShopClues, Zivame and ShopYourWorld dangled daylong discounts of up to 80% across categories such as electronics, apparel, home appliances and personal care products on Friday, which they designated Black Friday. Similar discounts offers will be on offer on Monday, tagged Cyber Monday.

To keep up with the competition, rivals like Snapdeal, Myntra and Jabong, too, offered the discounts although they did not theme them around the festival.

Thanksgiving, a national holiday in the US when families and friends get together for a traditional meal to say thanks for what they have, was celebrated on Thursday.

To mark the day, large online and offline retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Amazon. com Inc. and Target Corp. offer deep discounts to customers, making it one of the biggest pre-Christmas shopping times in the US. Indian e-commerce sites are following their example.

Few Indians may be able to appreciate the cultural meaning or significance of Thanksgiving Day, but promotional sales centred on the festival are a smart marketing tactic, said Dheeraj Sinha, chief strategy officer for South and South East Asia at advertising agency Grey Group India.

“Black Friday is becoming a global property and the highest sales volume is made just during that weekend in the US. So this was our chance to offer Indian consumers not just the similar discounts but also the latest gadgets and products that they might not have access to," said Vidmay Naini, who oversees technology product sales at PaisaPay and PowerShip, eBay India. “At the end of the day, it is to create a marketing hook and attract demand for particular day or weekend," he added.

eBay India, which ran a Black Friday campaign from 21 November to 28 November, received orders for three times the imported goods it received in the previous week.

The marketing calendar for e-commerce companies has expanded beyond local festivals like Holi, Diwali and Pongal. Online retailers are latching on to every opportunity to attract customers with steep discounts as they battle for market share in India.

Online retail is valued at $3.1 billion, or 10% of the organized retail market, and is estimated to grow to $22 billion, or over 15% of the organized retail market, in five years, according to a November 2013 report by brokerage firm CLSA.

Dutch retailer Bestseller Retail, which owns brands such as Vero Moda and Jack and Jones, is offering a flat 60% off on its merchandise only through online retailer Myntra.com Friday through Sunday.

Vineet Gautam, country head at the Indian arm of Bestseller Retail, said value-conscious Indian shoppers are less concerned about the occasion that the sale represents and more about the offers and discounts on offer, but added that “western trends are catching up, for sure."

Zivame.com, run by Actoserba Active Wholesale Pvt. Ltd, offered discounts of upto 60% in its Black Friday Weekend Sale.

Shopclues.com, too, offered hourly deals and discounts ranging from 30% to 70%.

Junglee.com’s Black Friday Deals Store offered discounts on more than 1,000 products ranging from the Sony Playstation console and Google Nexus 7 tablets to toys from Fisher Price and Lego, and hundreds of other products in categories such as home appliances, clothes and shoes.

Singapore-based Shop Your World Pte. Ltd than runs shopyourworld.com, an online global shopping platform that allows Indian consumers to shop for international branded products, tied up with eBay to offer similar discounts and products that eBay is offering globally on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

“We are offering some of the new product launches during Black Friday and Cyber Monday in US for Indian consumers," said Rahil Shah, co-founder and director of ShopYourWorld. To be sure, the Black Friday sale in India is of a much smaller scale when compared with markets like the US and UK, said Shah, whose company is offering upto 80% off on gadgets such as mobiles, tablets and TVs.

In Western markets, “retailers want to liquidate all the stock before Christmas, but that does not happen in India because for us Christmas is not such a big event," Shah said.

Swati Bhargava, co-founder of Cashkaro.com, a cash-back and coupon website that works with e-commerce portals such as Amazon, Myntra and Flipkart, agreed.

“While the trend reflects the maturing of Indian e-commerce economy, Black Friday is yet to become an established concept here in India," she said.

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Published: 29 Nov 2014, 12:01 AM IST
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