Google's online shopping festival off to a flying start

 

The second edition of Google's Great Online Shopping Festival got off to a flying start on Wednesday with participating online retailers reporting more than 50% higher sales than normal days despite the official website for the festival going down due to technical glitches. 

"The response has been phenomenal," Nitin Bawankule, industry director for e-commerce at Google India, said. "We expect the next two days to be even bigger." This year the Great Online Shopping Festival, or GOSF, is a threeday affair with about 200 online retailers taking part. 

Last year, it was a one-day event with 80 participants. Infibeam.com reported 80% jump in traffic and almost 60% jump is actual transaction in the first 10 hours of the shopping festival. "By midnight, we expect traffic to go up 150%," Shekhar Singh, head of corporate communications at Ahmedabad-based Infibeam, said. 

Similarly traffic and sales jumped 50% at Yebhi.com that offered 10% discount on electronic products and 33% discount on every other product they sell. 

Saurabh Malik, business head of Indiatimes Shopping, said Google has created enough buzz around the campaign and Indiatimes is expecting sales to go up almost five times during the three days compared to the normal days. He said Indiatimes also has been advertising about its plans for GOSF on Google and Facebook. Sportswear giant Puma said it expects its overall sales to go up 20 times this year. 

Manu Kumar Jain, co-founder at Jabong.com, said sales on the first day went up four to five times over usual sale. Many online retailers have even created micro sites for GOSF and some have links inviting shoppers to avail discounts. 

For example, UKbased shoe retailer Clarks has special GOSF price mentioned on discounted shoes and accessories. The official website for the festival, however, played spoilsport, as it was not functional until late in the evening due to technical glitches. 

Initially, the website went down due to an interface problem with mobile devices as Google was betting big on a chunk of traffic from mobile phones, a senior executive at an ecommerce firm said, quoting Google officials. Later, the site crashed again due to heavy traffic.