Nagpur: With just 48 hours to go before GST kicks in, retailers across Nagpur and those having channels in city like Big Bazaar and Amazon are making the last minute kill by luring the consumers with thumping offers. On the other end Consumers are treating it as an opportunity to stock up, as there are discounts galore.
Nagpurians are already out to grab the maximum discounts, bargaining on everything on sale, right from vehicles to electronics.
All the stores of Big Bazaar in Nagpur will remain open to shoppers on the midnight of June 30 to run a sale with discounts of up to 22%, e-tailer Flipkart said it will start its pre-GST sale from Wednesday midnight itself.
Flipkart’s rival Amazon has already been running a similar sale event with discounts of 40-50%, for mainly consumer electronics and home appliances.
It, however, refused to comment on pre-GST sales figures. “When you get a Rs 1-lakh TV for less than Rs 60,000, you cannot help but tell your friends to go for it. This is the best time to shop,” said Mukesh Saluja, a 35-year-old executive from Mumbai, who recently bought a new TV during a pre-GST sale at a store.
Ritesh Ghosal, chief marketing officer of Infiniti Retail, which owns Croma, said, “Most offline retailers of consumer electronics and durables, who follow a sell-in model, are aggressively pushing stocks that are older than six months because they will not get full benefit on those after GST”
High-street retailers have also started pushing sales of products such as apparel, shoes and accessories. “You can call it a preponement of the end-of-season-sale,” said Rishabh Soni, MD of SSIPL, which operates around 300 stores, including that of Nike, Clarks, Benetton and Asics.
Mobile wallet company Paytm, which recently launched its online store Paytm Mall, has witnessed traffic to its platform go up by three times over last month.
“The pre-GST sale is our effort to help retailers clear their inventory,” said Amit Sinha, COO of Paytm Mall. However, while most GST sales are slated to end after the June 30, Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani told TOI that July 1 is just the beginning.
“Prices of many daily items such as toothpaste and others are going to decrease with the advent of GST. But FMCG companies are not ready to relent and said they are going to adopt a wait-and-watch policy. Our offers are an effort to force them to bring prices down from July 1,” he said.
