The festive season is here and like every year, the Amazon Great Indian Festival took care of all our festive shopping needs — from big purchases to small ones and from urgent needs to indulgent ones— with enticing offers, discounts and purchase options on a wide range of product categories.

This year, the Amazon Great Indian Festival showcased the largest ever selection of products, including a million unique products from emerging, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and start-ups and over 55,000 artisan products from 20 states. Here are a few highlights of this year’s Amazon Great Indian Festival:

  • More customers shopped on Amazon.in than ever before with record number of Prime sign-ups.
  • 91% of new customers hailed from tier 2 and 3 towns. Fashion and Smartphones were the main attractions.
  • Groceries grew 3.5X over an average business day with enough oil to light up 10MM diyas.
  • Large appliances and TVs saw record sales over the first 36 hours with nearly 10X* growth led by brands like Whirlpool, Samsung, IFB and LG.  
  • Record number of customers upgraded to premium smartphones; sales from brands OnePlus, Samsung and Apple exceeded INR 750 crores within the first 36 hours.      

The Great Indian Festival 2019 kick-started with the #AmazonFestiveYatra — a unique concept built to share this shopping experience with a larger number of people. In the form of a house-on-wheels a — 1050-sq ft display space made by joining three trucks together — the #AmazonFestiveYatra brought the best of Indian craftsmanship on one platform. The house-on-wheels covered a distance of 6,000km across 13 Indian cities to showcase over 600 products that reflect the colours, diversity, talent and richness of India.

The #AmazonFestiveYatra concluded its 25-day journey around the country by combining the festive celebration with the joy of giving. Over 600 products from the Festive Yatra, worth INR 10 lakh, were donated to support the empowerment of the girl child. The donations included a wide range of products including innovations from Indian startups, creations from women entrepreneurs as well as handicrafts and handlooms from artisans, weavers and tribal communities from all over India.

Play

Among the donations, the consumables will help stock up Akshaya Patra Foundation’s kitchens, which serve freshly cooked mid-day meals to over 18 lakh school-going children across India. Some select products which showcase India’s rich heritage — such as Rogan art painting from Gujarat, Dokhra art from Chhattisgarh, brass and marble showpieces from Uttar Pradesh, Tanjore paintings from Tamil Nadu and more — were auctioned to raise funds for the cause of the girl child. The proceeds from the auction will help boost the efforts of ‘Beyond The Meals’ initiatives such as School and Student Transformation, Avsar scholarship programme and Giving Every Dream A Chance talent mentorship program, all of which seek to enable the empowerment of the girl child.

This is the third year in a row in which Amazon contributed to festivities in a meaningful and impactful manner. Apart from the donations and auction of the products showcased during #AmazonFestiveYatra, Amazon employees will also be engaged in a fund-raising and volunteering programme, this October, with an aim to bring more girls to schools and empower them.

This is a partnered post