Big Billion Day (BBD) is the Indian online retailer and marketplace Flipkart’s take on Amazon Prime Day. Coming up in October in advance of the festive season in India, the promotional event will see deep discounts across the board. And such is the success of the event in previous year, apparently new merchants have been signing up to get involved.
The company claims that the rate of seller acquisition has doubled in the past six months and now “one lakh” merchants are now actively trading there. A lakh is a unit in the Indian number system equal to one hundred thousand. The new sellers are said to be active in all categories across the marketplace.
Flipkart has also claimed that marketplace sellers in 2017 enjoyed success during BBD and typically saw growth of between 2.5 times to 6 times during the sale and they are confident of a stronger performance this year.
(The) entire fashion category has seen a phenomenal growth. In fashion, you have clothing, accessories, footwear. Then, we have also seen growth in home-related segments like furnishings, decor and household items. Even general merchandise items like toys and baby products have seen a lot of growth.
– Nishant Gupta, Senior Director Marketplace, Flipkart
There could be some other reasons for the increase in merchants applying to sell on the marketplace. They claim to have the lowest fees of any of the marketplaces in the competitive Indian field and in August the fees charged for low-value items were reduced. Flipkart has also made service improvement to how it manages and fulfils items for merchants, according to reports.
We’ve already written about Big Billion Day. And in that story we noted that home electricals would be the one focus of the day and Flipkart was particularly looking forward to seeing an increase in sales in their private label brands. Those are the goods that Flipkart sells as a retailer themselves, specifically low cost electrical products like fridges and microwaves. So this news is doubtless intended to serve as a reminder that they also offer a strong opportunity to third-party marketplace merchants.
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Have any UK sellers managed to get onto Flipkart?