The 2026 festive sales opened in the second week of October, and the first estimates are in. Here is what they say, what they mean if you sell on Amazon, Flipkart or Meesho, and eight things worth doing before the season ends.
The first two days, in numbers
Redseer Strategy Consultants estimated, as reported by PTI on 12 October 2026, that in the first two days of the festive sales:
- Shoppers bought about ₹24,000 crore of goods across e-commerce platforms.
- They placed about 8 to 9 crore orders, roughly 14 times a normal day's orders.
- About 6 to 6.5 crore people shopped, and about two-thirds of them were from Tier 2 cities and rural areas.
- First-time shoppers doubled compared with last year.
- Mobiles were the largest share of sales, at about 38 to 40%, followed by consumer electronics at about 25 to 27% and fashion at about 15 to 18%. Fashion grew about 22 to 25% year on year.
These are a consultancy's early estimates, not the platforms' own results, and the final figures for the season will come later.
What it means for sellers
Order volume is the real story. Fourteen times a normal day's orders means fourteen times the labels, the packing and the pickups. Most seller trouble in a sale week is not demand; it is the order pile that builds up when the daily routine does not scale.
Smaller towns are buying. With two-thirds of shoppers from Tier 2 cities and rural areas, expect more cash-on-delivery orders, longer delivery routes and, later, more returns. Price, a clear product title and photos that show the real product matter more to a first-time buyer than to a regular one.
Fashion is growing. If you sell value fashion, festive wear and accessories, the season is still running. Keep your best sellers in stock and your size charts right; a wrong size is the most common fashion return.
8 tips for the rest of the season
1. Clear the ship-by date first, every morning. Sort today's orders by their ship-by or dispatch-by date before anything else. A late dispatch in a sale week hurts your account health just when the most buyers are seeing your listings.
2. Keep stock in step on every marketplace. If you sell the same product on several marketplaces from one shelf, a sale on one can oversell it on another. Update stock at least twice a day during the sale, and keep a small buffer on fast sellers.
3. Print a pick list before you pack. One line per SKU with the total quantity across the whole batch lets you pull stock once, instead of walking the shelves for every order. It also shows, before packing starts, which SKUs you are short of.
4. Make multi-item orders loud. In a rush, a packer reads the first line of a label and seals the box. Mark every order with two or more products, or more than one unit, so it gets a second look. A missing item in a festive order is a refund, a return and an unhappy first-time buyer.
5. Use 4 x 6 labels on a thermal printer. Printing A4 pages and cutting them by hand does not scale to fourteen times your normal orders. A cropped 4 x 6 label prints in a second and scans first time. Our thermal printer checklist covers the settings.
6. Get the weight and the size right. Couriers re-measure parcels, and a weight or size declared too low leads to extra charges, often weeks later. Weigh one packed parcel of each product and box combination, and save those figures instead of guessing. More in our guide to volumetric weight and weight disputes.
7. Plan for returns now. First-time buyers and cash-on-delivery orders return more. Keep space and time set aside for returns in the two to three weeks after the sale, check every returned parcel on arrival, and keep the return codes your courier asks for ready at handover.
8. Run the same routine at the same time every day. A fixed daily time for accepting, printing and handing over orders keeps the pile from growing between pickups. If a task is the same every day, it is a task worth automating.
Let the routine run itself
The Sellerio Seller Toolkit is a free Chrome extension that runs the daily order routine on Amazon Easy Ship, Seller Flex, Flipkart and Meesho: it accepts orders, crops and prints 4 x 6 labels with your own SKU on them, saves a pick list and gets the pickup and return codes, at a daily time you choose13.
Add to Chrome — freeAmazon, Flipkart & Meesho · Free for everyone · No API key or password
It runs in Chrome on a computer. On a phone, send yourself the link.
Figures: Redseer Strategy Consultants, as reported by PTI on 12 October 2026. Amazon, Flipkart and Meesho are trademarks of their respective owners. Sellerio is independent and not affiliated with them.