Amazon Great Indian Festival: More iPhones Sold in One Day Than Entire Last Year’s Sale

Amazon said that it has sold more iPhones on the opening day of the Great Indian Festival — which was only for Prime members — than the entire sale last year. The feat appears to be the effect of Amazon's deep discount on the iPhone 11 listed for Rs 47,999. Overall, the company has said that the Great Indian Festival, on till October 21, has registered its biggest ever opening this year. Unsurprisingly, the top sold categories have been smartphones, large appliances, and consumer electronics, with Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, and Xiaomi selling products in record numbers. This comes on the back of a year where, despite the early setbacks to e-commerce owing to COVID-19, online sales have gone on to set records.

The top-selling electronics have been smartphones, laptops, headphones, tablets, cameras, and smartwatches, along with security cameras and drones being popular searches. Asus, Lenovo, and HP have been the top-selling brands in laptops; Samsung and Apple in tablets; and TP Link and Netgear in networking products.

iPhone 11, Redmi Note Series, Redmi 9A, OnePlus 8T and Nord, and Samsung M31 have been the top-selling phones. OnePlus 43-inch and 32-inch, along with Samsung 32-inch, have been the most popular TVs.

Amazon said that it has sold 2.5 times more Kindle devices than on the first day of the sale last year. Its Fire TV Stick along and Echo (3rd Generation) have been among the top 10 products sold on the website during the sale. The streaming devices category as a whole sold twice the units of last year's first-day sale. The Great Indian Festival also launched 1,100 new products, the most popular among them being the OnePlus 8T and Nord, the Samsung M31 Prime Edition, and the Xbox Series S.

Amazon claimed that 85 percent more people signed up for Prime membership to get early access to the sale this year compared to last year. And Alexa had a field day at the opening. The company said that Alexa devices answered 1 million requests on the Amazon website app to help customers navigate through different stores. Over 1,10,000 sellers received an order and 32 percent of sellers on Amazon had their biggest day on the e-commerce website. Made available in five languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, and Kannada — apart from English, the Great Indian Festival has recorded sales from 98.4 percent pin codes in the first 48 hours.

How to find the best deals during online sales? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.