No offers for customers this Diwali as eCommerce companies are planning to save margins.

If you are waiting for the festive season to avail the shopping deals offered by eCommerce firms during Diwali, let us tell you one thing that all you might get is disappointment this year. Yes, you read it correct.

If reports are to be believed, all the eCommerce firms are looking to protect margins after having offered an aggressive discounting policy in the previous years. The offers made by the eCommerce majors were to gain market share and traffic.

Industry experts are also presuming it as a turning point for the online retail sector in the near future.

Senior executives of Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and other market leaders have informed the top brands like Apple, Sony, Samsung and Puma – accounting nearly three-fourth of the online market – that they won’t reduce prices.

"This is probably the first time that eCommerce biggies are talking about margins and profitability. They have informed us that there won't be any deep discounting for the big brands since they want to earn healthy profit margins too, with eCommerce sales expected to double this year," said the sales head of a leading Japanese consumer electronics brand.

Abhishek Ganguly, the managing director at Puma India says, "They might make the same noise and spend as much marketing money but discounts will be lower."

Experts, however, are saying that the move by eCommerce companies won’t affect the sales in any ways as the count of vendors and product categories has increased.

Srinivas Murthy, senior vice-president, marketing at Snapdeal looked so confident about the Snapdeal’s preparations ahead of the lucrative festive season. Murthy says, "Snapdeal saw a tremendous surge in sales during Diwali last year, recording 15x increase in traffic. This year, we expect Diwali to be a bigger success and are up scaling the platform to manage increased traffic. Our customer as well as seller base have grown phenomenally in the last year and we expect this base to further expand exponentially during the Diwali 2015 season."

Manish Sharma, managing director at Panasonic India, however, says that last year’s discounts were needed to build awareness. "This season, lesser discounts and offers are expected to be floated as compared to last year as there needs to be more focus on tightening delivery systems and processes," he said. "eCommerce channels will keep their advertising and discounting measured, and address both the front-end and back-end infrastructure capabilities necessary to handle the demand surge the season brings."
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