India celebrates at home as lesser pandals expected this year
Environment-friendly and plantable idols saw a huge jump in growth of sales
Decoration, sweets, puja accessories among top sellers
Maharashtra, August 20, 2020: COVID-19 caused travel restrictions and social distancing is not stopping Indians from celebrating their festivals with enthusiasm and fervour, although more privately this year. With Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in full swing, Snapdeal shoppers are buying idols and other essential items for the festival.
The platform witnessed a 6X increase in the sale of small Ganesh idols over last year. It also has a special discount of up to 80% on over one lakh products needed for the festival.
The increase in the sale of idols is due to the hesitance to visit conventional markets. Many families have also planned to bring Ganesha home as many mandals have canceled the mass pandal celebrations due to the pandemic.
This year, Snapdeal saw an accelerated adoption of environmentally friendly Ganesh idols made of cow dung, natural soil, clay, and other sustainable materials. Some idols are also filled with seeds and grow into plants when immersed in a vase or garden while others act as manure to plants.
The idols are attractive and do not leave a chemical trail harming the environment.
The commonly used idols are made of Plaster of Paris (PoP) and are decorated with paints having high lead and mercury content. The materials are extremely harmful to the water bodies and deteriorate the marine ecosystem.
Decoration items such as LED lights, rangoli stencils, lamps, torans, and wall hangings have also been bought. Pooja items such as ghee diyabatti, puja set combos, brass and aluminum diyas, incense sticks, dhoop, and aarti thalis were among the other top sellers.
Small traditional musical instruments including manjera and dholkis are also being bought along with Bluetooth speakers to make the houses reverberate with melodious devotional songs andaarti dedicated to Lord Ganesha.
45% of orders for the festival came from Maharashtra. Some of the other states from where Snapdeal received a high volume of orders were Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Delhi NCR.
Snapdeal has added a wide variety of products on its platform to meet the growing needs of Indian consumers for the upcoming festive season. In the last 12 months, Snapdeal has on-boarded 75,000 sellers and now has more than 500,000 registered sellers. The platform delivers products to 26,000-plus pin codes pan-India.
Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)
