Snapdeal's Oct unique user traffic slumps

MUMBAI, INDIA: Most daily deals sites witnessed a drastic drop in unique user traffic in October 2011, with Snapdeal leading the pack with a 45 per cent decline, according to the latest data by ViziSense, an online audience and ad measurement platform.

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 one-sixth of their visitors had checked out product deals out of which 40 per cent 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 per cent (possibly on the back of its TV campaign) over the previous month, followed by Flipkart at 55 per cent and eBay.in at 48 per cent.

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.

“It's 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,” said Amit Bhartiya, GM - ViziSense .

“At the same time, drop in traffic on daily deals sites, 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 restaurant 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,” he concluded.