Indian MSMEs bounce back ahead of Independence Day

• Flipkart Sellers from Tier-2 cities & beyond witness significant business during the five-day Independence Day sale event
• Flipkart witnessed 54 percent increase in transacting sellers compared to last year
• ~8,000 newly onboarded sellers participated in their first sale event, with over 450 of them becoming ‘lakhpatis’ over these five days

Bengaluru – August 14, 2020: Digital India takes a new stride as local Indian MSMEs continue to unlock the potential of e-commerce and digitization. Kickstarting the festive season, sellers on the Flipkart Marketplace platform witnessed significant business growth in the company’s recently concluded five-day-long Independence Day Sale from August 6-10. During this period, the Flipkart marketplace platform recorded a 54 percent increase in transacting sellers compared to last year. The Independence Day Sale event saw participation from sellers primarily from Tier 2 cities and beyond; that have now become local businesses with strong growth pipelines.

With businesses across India rethinking their operations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, e-commerce has emerged as the preferred channel to connect with consumers nationwide. With its pan-India market access and a wide array of products and services, e-commerce has been able to provide businesses with the comfort of working with limited resources and still be able to achieve strong financial growth. Since the nationwide COVID-19-induced lockdown, Flipkart saw an increased interest from sellers to join the platform. Since then, the company has onboarded almost 8,000 sellers to its online marketplace, with more than 70 percent of them coming from smaller towns. Flipkart is supplementing its onboarding efforts with free business incubation support for new sellers for the first 60 days. This includes equipping sellers with insights in matters of product support, advertising, and speed support.

This Independence Day being the first major sale-event for the newly onboarded sellers, the marketplace saw maximum participation of sellers from New Delhi, followed by Surat, Jaipur, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Ghaziabad, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Agra. Subsequently, cities such as Dharuhera, Datia, Harapanahalli, Cachar, Motihari, Purnia, Tezpur, Sibsagar, Dholpur and Etawah became the new cities that saw the highest number of seller participation.

Key categories that led seller growth included – grooming, household items, books and media, food and nutrition, toys, makeup and fragrances, women ethnic contemporary wear, personal healthcare, home furnishing and mobile protection.

Bhupendra Patel, one of the sellers from Panipat who participated in Flipkart’s Independence Day sale, is elated by the kind of growth his online business, Home Sizzlers has seen on the platform, despite the external situation. Home Sizzlers operate in selling curtains and bedsheets and saw almost double the sale this season. According to him, once he was successfully able to resume his operations on the platform by May-end, his business has seen an upward growth of 10-15% each month. Because of this growth, he has been able to continue not just supporting his workforce throughout this phase, but also give them additional financial compensation to manage their household requirements. As for his online business, he has seen a lot of new customers coming in from the East and Southern part of the country where usually the demand was low. Home Sizzlers has witnessed an overall increase in demand of 20-30% coming in from Tier 2 and 3 cities. He is grateful for the opportunity that e-commerce has given him and is keen to work with his employees to manage the upcoming festive season.

Similarly, Madhusudan who runs his online business on Flipkart by the name TRIPR, is excited about the growth his business saw in the recently concluded sales and feels that opportunities like these help boost his business growth and enables him to relook at his strategy. Catering to the Men’s and Kid’s wear category, his business saw 2.5x growth in order nos. during the Independence Day sale. Coupled with insights shared by his account management team at Flipkart, Madhusudan was able to ramp up his offerings in casual and innerwear as part of his portfolio. His business has a lot of dependency on the migrant workforce, especially those skilled in textile and fabric manufacturing. With an opportunity to resume operations online, he was able to bring them back from their hometown and provide them with livelihood support.