The Reality Behind the Discounts Offered by E-Commerce Websites Like Amazon and Flipkart

From 70 to 80% of products where discounts were on offer, surprisingly, Flipkart was more liberal than Amazon during the reviewed period.

About 30% of the electronic products on Amazon and 19% on Flipkart have sold with no discounts during October. The irony is that October is rated as the month of festivals where these two companies make huge claims about discounts and deals!

According to Actowiz Solutions' research, Flipkart has offered 26.3% discounts on average across the mentioned categories compared to Amazon, which provided merely 10.6% discounts!

And the exciting fact is that Amazon was publicly running its leading sale called 'The Great Indian Festival' for the whole month; Flipkart settled its 'The Big Billion Days Sale' on 10 th October.

The pattern is a bit different from the week-long data reported last month. Through the initial week of this festive season, these companies have provided no extra discounts on 30% of product categories, including pro,

Though Amazon continues to follow this trend, Flipkart looks to be a bit aggressive there.

On the product level, for air conditioners, Flipkart has offered discounts for 84% of products, while Amazon provided that only for 73.1% of products. Laptops have seen a minimum of 87% of the products on Flipkart with discounts, whereas on Amazon, it was merely 76.3%!

After the poor show during the festive season last year, customers' demands for fashion were back in the year, with new platforms and affordable models targeting all Tier II users.

Smart TV fascinatingly had a diverse pattern. Whereas Amazon had 72.1% of products available at discounted pricing, Flipkart had merely 63.7% of smart TVs available at a discount.

Fascinatingly, on Amazon and Flipkart, a minimum of 2.5% and 3.1% of the electronic products had a price hike in this period under reviews, respectively.

Sellers choose the pricing of Amazon products. Their investments in infrastructure and technology have permitted them to save in cost and constantly provide great pricing to customers. Their partnership with sellers, banks, and ecosystem partners helps them add more value using exchange offers, no-cost EMIs, and prompt bank discounts.

Ahmedabad-based web scraping company Actowiz Solutions has made price comparisons with rates shown on 1 st October, the last business day before a sale, and a month-long sales period starting on 3 rd October.

For this analysis, Actowiz Solutions has crawled pages of the electronics category that houses products like cameras, headphones, air- conditioners, laptops, refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines, smart watches, and smart televisions. The company has scanned 2,285 Amazon products and 3,131 Flipkart products.

According to professionals, customers have become happy with e-commerce shopping during the pandemic providing it as an added benefit. It helps the marketplaces to avoid massive discounts to store customers. Convenience looks to have taken preference over discounts for most customers shopping online.

Continuous government vigilance has discouraged markets from giving significant discounts on these platforms. In the past few months, the government has been very serious about the business models of these foreign e-commerce companies.

These two e-commerce websites are also experiencing an investigation by the CCI (Competition Commission of India) under the Competition Act Section 3.

As Flipkart and Amazon didn't mention the GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) of the goods sold in the month, both these websites have said that Tier II-III towns have become significant contributors to the sales this festival season.