India’s Festive Shoppers Are Spending More, But Are They Saving More?

India’s festive shopping season is producing a curious contradiction. Consumers are looking for discounts, stacking bank offers with cashback and sharing deals through social networks. Yet the average value of their shopping baskets is rising, too.

Between October 7 and 12, CashKaro recorded gross merchandise value (GMV) of ₹1,003.3 crore across Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra and AJIO, covering 38 lakh orders. Compared with a comparable six-day business-as-usual period, GMV increased approximately 18 times, while order volumes grew more than sevenfold.

The average order value rose from ₹1,100 to ₹2,639, an increase of about 2.4 times. The company also reported distributing ₹26 crore in cashback during the sale, compared with ₹6.1 crore in the corresponding regular period.

The numbers point to a consumer willing to spend more during promotional periods while actively seeking ways to lower the effective purchase price. Whether that translates into greater savings, however, depends on what shoppers would have paid without the offers and whether the discounts influenced them to buy more.

The bigger basket

The increase in average order value is one of the more significant trends in CashKaro’s data. While orders rose from 5.04 lakh to 38 lakh, the increase in GMV was substantially larger.

This suggests that the festive sale drove both higher transaction volumes and higher spending per order. But average order value alone cannot establish whether consumers bought more products, opted for more expensive items or combined purchases to maximise discounts.

The distinction matters for retailers and marketplaces. A rise in order volumes indicates greater transaction activity, while a higher average order value can improve the value generated by each transaction. Neither necessarily indicates a corresponding increase in profitability, particularly when discounts, cashback and payment offers are factored in.

For shoppers, the economics are less straightforward. A lower effective price can make a planned purchase more attractive, but a discount can also encourage spending that would otherwise have been deferred or avoided.

Fashion and electronics lead demand

The category data suggests that festive demand extended beyond smartphones, traditionally a prominent category during major e-commerce sales.

Men’s ethnic wear recorded the highest order growth against the business-as-usual period, at 28.6 times. Televisions followed at 26.4 times, while men’s branded T-shirts and topwear grew 24.9 times. Orders for tablets increased 23 times, laptops and desktops 21.6 times, and beauty and personal care products 20.8 times.

The growth multiples indicate a sharp concentration of purchases during the promotional window. They should not, however, be interpreted as year-on-year growth rates. The comparison is between six days of festive sales and a comparable regular period, making the results sensitive to the baseline and the timing of purchases.

Mobile phones remained the largest GMV driver during the sale, but CashKaro reported a 7–10% year-on-year decline in the category. The company attributed the slowdown to rising memory-chip and component costs, which have pushed up retail prices and extended upgrade cycles.

Trade-in offers, no-cost equated monthly instalments and exchange programmes continued to support mobile purchases. This suggests that financing and exchange mechanisms remain important in a category where higher prices can make consumers more cautious.

Smaller cities record faster growth

The festive sales data also points to the spread of online shopping demand beyond India’s largest urban markets.

Tier 2 cities recorded 722% growth in GMV compared with the regular period, followed by Tier 1 cities at 684% and Tier 3 markets at 639%.

At the city level, Bhubaneswar recorded approximately 910% growth. Pune followed at 796%, Patna at 777%, Hyderabad at 748% and Bengaluru at 740%. Lucknow recorded 696% growth, while Kolkata grew 692% and Delhi 646%.

These figures indicate that demand on CashKaro’s platform expanded rapidly across a range of cities. However, growth rates do not establish which markets contributed the most spending. A city starting from a smaller base can record a higher percentage increase without overtaking a larger market in absolute GMV.

For brands, the figures reinforce the importance of looking beyond metropolitan demand when planning festive campaigns. Understanding the absolute contribution of each market, alongside its growth rate, would help determine where additional marketing investment could generate the strongest returns.

Telegram becomes a deal-discovery channel

The way consumers discover offers is another notable development in the data.

During the six-day sale, more than five lakh deal posts were shared on Telegram through EarnKaro links, compared with 87,000 during the regular period. These posts generated more than 50 million clicks to partner websites.

CashKaro’s sister platform EarnKaro powered 80% of the deal links shared on Telegram, according to the company. Brands increased their marketing spends on the platform through EarnKaro by more than tenfold, while many reportedly achieved returns on advertising spend exceeding 15 times.

The figures highlight how deal-sharing communities can serve as a distribution channel for e-commerce promotions. Instead of relying solely on advertising placements or searches, brands can reach consumers through links circulated by group administrators and other users.

However, clicks are not equivalent to completed purchases. The company has also clarified that the Telegram data comes from a separate deal-sharing dataset and is not included in the reported GMV. Conversion rates and attributable sales would be needed to establish the channel’s contribution to actual transactions.

The economics of stacking savings

CashKaro said shoppers combined marketplace discounts, bank offers and cashback to reduce the effective price of their purchases. Some users also shared affiliate links through EarnKaro, earning commissions on sales generated through those links.

This creates a layered system in which the listed price is only one part of the transaction. The final cost can depend on the sale discount, payment method and cashback eligibility. For consumers sharing affiliate links, the transaction can also generate an additional income stream.

For brands, the model offers another route to reach shoppers who are actively searching for deals. For consumers, it creates opportunities to compare offers and extract additional value from a purchase.

But the distinction between saving and spending remains important. The amount saved against a product’s listed price does not necessarily reflect savings against the price at which the shopper would otherwise have bought it. Nor does a lower effective price guarantee that the purchase was necessary or planned.

CashKaro’s festive data captures a six-day surge in transactions, a higher average order value and increased deal-sharing activity. It offers evidence of how consumers are responding to promotions on the platform, but it does not establish whether these behaviours will persist outside the festive season.

The larger question for e-commerce companies is whether the sale has brought forward purchases that would have happened anyway or generated incremental demand. For shoppers, the question is simpler: whether the money saved on each purchase outweighs the money spent because the deal was too attractive to ignore.