Snapdeal Beat Flipkart on Big Sale Day, Says Social Media Study

With the mixed response on social media platforms to Flipkart's Big Billion Day sale and Snapdeal's sale on October 6, a Mumbai-based social media and research agency has published a brief analytics report.

The TeamPumpkin report, titled "#Flipkart vs #Snapdeal; The Social Media Angle", is about the much-hyped sales that created records for the Indian e-commerce industry.

According to the report, Snapdeal, which had created a buzz by hosting a quiz ahead of the sale on October 6, got great traction during the morning across social media platforms, but Flipkart still kept leading throughout the day. It adds that the Flipkart mentions on social media were much more than the Snapdeal in the evening time.

The report also noted Flipkart was over the course of the day subjected to a larger backlash, with roughly 21 percent negative mentions, roughly 55 percent neutral mentions, and roughly 25 percent positive mentions. Although Snapdeal had lower mentions overall, it had a higher percentage of positive mentions, at roughly 31 percent. It had roughly 9 percent negative mentions, and 60 percent neutral mentions.

Both Flipkart and Snapdeal had taken out advertisements on a large scale to publicise their campaigns. Snapdeal even took a dig at Flipkart's 1-day Big Billion Day scheme with its tagline, "For others it's a big day. For us, today is no different".

In terms of gender engagement, males dominated. Snapdeal had a higher female to male gender ratio compared to Flipkart. It had about 21.9 percent female engagement to Flipkart's 18.5 percent.

After the sale, when Flipkart claimed it sold products worth $100 million (over Rs. 600 crore) within 10 hours, Snapdeal said that its sales were worth Rs. 1 crore a minute in 10 hours - which translates into a figure similar to Flipkart's.

Snapdeal claimed that it sold 10 products per second across categories between October 3 and October 5 but did not disclose the total sales value. The company said it sold a smartphone every 6 seconds, a laptop every 20 seconds, a tablet every 30 seconds, a saree every 30 seconds, a pair of footwear every 10 seconds, etc.

Detailing the reasons behind the report, TeamPumpkin said, "The day begun with one of the most interesting ad wars in the front pages of leading newspapers of recent times. It ended happily for both Flipkartand Snapdeal clocking their highest sale in a single day and making a history in the Indian e-commerce space. What happened in the middle, however, is something that Indian consumers will remember for long! Whether it was Flipkart's failure to live up to people's expectations in terms of discounted merchandise availability or Snapdeal's Quiz which helped in trending #CheckSnapdealToday or people sitting across their homes and offices refreshing their pages every hour to check for an interesting deal, Indian e-commerce surely had many lessons to learn. One for sure, that you cannot take your customers for granted. Flipkart did that and was subjected to massive backlash across social media for price changes, merchandize unavailability and even technical "Page Not Found" errors. Snapdeal, in the meanwhile, did an amazing job with a well placed quiz, hourly set of offers and neat execution of the day long activities. Another well learnt lesson was not to spill the beans too soon. Flipkart revealed the date in advance and the competition took the best advantage out of it.Nevertheless, the day ended well for both the e-commerce players with both of them clocking their highest sales, and setting up best examples for the Indian e-commerce industry".