Festive season favours shopping cart sites vs. daily deals

ViziSense, India's leading online audience and ad measurement platform has released the latest data for the month of October 2011. According to ViziSense, most leading daily deals sites witnessed a drastic drop in unique user traffic in the month of October 2011, with the leading site Snapdeal witnessing a drop of more than 45% in monthly unique users.

Coincidentally, this is also the period in which most of these sites are expanding into discounted products to increase their appeal within users. Sites like Snapdeal have started focussing on electronics, mobile phones amongst other items and these categories form a large part of their marketing campaigns seen in this period. Moreover, only 1/6th of their visitors had checked out product deals out of which 40% showed interest in mobile phones.

On the other hand, product driven and shopping cart based e-commerce websites saw a surge in unique user traffic in October 2011. Yebhi.com lead the pack and witnessed the highest growth in unique users at 67% (possibly on the back of its TV campaign) over the previous month followed by Flipkart at 55% and eBay.in at 48%. The surge in traffic in October can be partly attributed to festival buying and gifting during the festival season in India. This is also the first time time when Flipkart overtook ebay.in in terms of unique users and is now inching closer to homeshop18 for the leadership position within this category.

Amit Bhartiya, GM - ViziSense said, " Its encouraging to see the leading e-commerce players consistently grow their traffic and usage, some through TV campaigns, others through category expansion or finding higher appeal within their target users. At the same time, drop in traffic on daily deals sites (although one month is not adequate to prompt a verdict), especially when they are expanding rapidly into products from their original domain of services raises some good questions. Are these early signs of fatigue for users consuming restuarant and spa vouchers or should products as a category be left to the shopping cart format of sites ? We at ViziSense want to keenly monitor these trends in the coming months, to gauge the pulse of the Indian e-shopper."