Ugam uses Big Data analytics to dissect the great Indian Diwali eCommerce sale

Ugam recently announced its pricing and assortment intelligence analysis of the recently concluded Amazon Great Indian Diwali Sale revealing insights on Amazon’s pricing competitiveness and assortment strategies for the festive season.

The study synthesized a list of likely bestselling products across three categories – laptops, home appliances, books – and compared Amazon’s assortment and pricing to that of Flipkart and Snapdeal.

Key pricing findings:

• Amazon dominated the sale period, offering the lowest prices in 2 out of the 3 categories
• In home appliances, Amazon offered 6% and 4% lower prices compared to Snapdeal and Flipkart, respectively
• In laptops, Amazon offered 5% higher prices compared to Snapdeal and tied prices with Flipkart
• In books, Amazon offered 53% and 26% lower prices compared to Snapdeal and Flipkart, respectively
• When compared to Flipkart Big Billion Days Sale, Amazon Great Indian Diwali Sale offered lower prices in the home appliances and books categoriesKey assortment findings:
• Amazon may not have always had the largest assortment, but it was well stocked on the likely bestsellers On October 28, 2015, Amazon offered the largest assortment of books, however it lagged in the laptops and home appliances categories
• During the sale period (Oct 26-28, 2015), 4 out of the 5 likely bestselling laptops and all likely bestselling home appliances and books were in stock on AmazonMihir Kittur, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Ugam said, “The sales during the festive season are crucial for every retailer. As the competition intensifies and consumer choices increase, offering the right products at the right prices becomes all the more important for driving better business results. In this hyper competitive and information transparent environment, knowing everything about customers is not enough.
  Big data analytics is a critical capability that can be leveraged to get a comprehensive view of both customers and competitors to make informed pricing, assortment and promotional decisions.”

  Analysis methodology
  To conduct this analysis and infer meaningful insights, Ugam used its proprietary Assortment Intelligence solution to identify trending products by collecting and analyzing consumer demand data for three categories – laptops, home appliances and books. It then aggregated detailed pricing information from Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal to determine who was selling these products and at what price.