OnePlus Wants Your Samsung Flagship For A OnePlus 2

OnePlus is looking to get owners of Samsung’s flagship smartphones to trade in their handsets against their new OnePlus 2 smartphone.

The company is taking trade ins of the Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+ and the Galaxy Note 5, in return they will give you one of their new OnePlus 2 smartphones.

We’re confident that we’ve created one of the most fantastic smartphones on the market today. So confident that we’re willing to put our money where our mouths are.

Owners of a Samsung flagship phone (Galaxy S6, S6 edge, S6 edge+, or Note 5) can trade theirs in for the newly launched OnePlus 2, and we’ll donate your old smartphone to Hope Phones!

The company is doing this with only 50 OnePlus 2 handsets and the Samsung Galaxy devices that are traded in will be donated to the charity Hope Phones, you can find out more information at the link below.

Source OnePlus, GSM Arena

E-com’s Diwali dhamaka: while customers splurged, here’s how it went for e-commerce players

Compared to last year, e-commerce platforms seem to be better equipped at handling the incredible scale of Indian consumers this festival season. With app only sales, new offers on an hourly basis, and offers catering to night owls at midnight, e-commerce platforms have mostly hit all the right notes to keep a variety of consumers and their sellers happy this festival season. Here’s a status check on how some of the major players did.

Snapdeal

Jayant Sood, chief customer experience officer, Snapdeal reported, “We have seen 17x surge in order volume on the first day. All our efforts for this sale has paid off – 85% of orders placed yesterday have already been shipped out, and the rest 15% today.”

Snapdeal saw air-conditioners, washing machines and geysers selling the most. From today till the 17th, they are holding a Diwali sale across all categories and are expecting a hike in sales across these items.

ShopClues

ShopClues claimed that during their #ekzerokum ‘Diwali Se Pehle Dhamaka’ campaign their GMV peak run rates shot upto 4x (almost 2.5 – 3 lakh units expected to be sold on day one), spiking up the orders to around five times, compared to regular days. Shopclues’ top selling categories has been Mega Deals along with Diwali Flea Market. While their unstructured portfolio across fashion, home and general merchandise categories has been a hit, mobile and electronics deals continue to stock out at super value price points. “We expect the response to snowball to even higher figures as the campaign unveils. It’s a testimony of the deep connect we have with our consumers,” said Nitin Kochhar, AVP – Categories, ShopClues.com.

Flipkart

Flipkart claims to have sold one million units in the first 10 hours of the sale and had 20 million total visits in 19 hours since the event opened on midnight.

Amazon

Amazon.in claims that the first day of ‘The Great Indian Festive Sale’ was the biggest day in their history. For comparison it was two times bigger than their previous ‘Great Indian Freedom Sale’ and four times bigger than the peak of last Diwali.

Amazon saw thousands of customers placing orders every minute for over 10 lakh products that were up for order. On the user experience and technical front they said that they had no technical glitches with their website or app.

Amazon saw customers across all channels across PC, app, and mobile web. But the traffic from mobile accounted for 70 percent. They also saw lakhs of new customers coming from cities like Aurangabad, Malappuram, Dhanbad, Kannur, Tiruchirappalli, Jamshedpur, and others. Amazon claims that on the first day of Navratra, small and medium scale business sellers on their platform saw 8-10 times jump in their daily sales.

Amazon saw orders from grocery and gourmet grow by 3X in unit terms as compared to their previous biggest day and 5X compared to the pre-sale period. They also saw products such as chocolates, Indian sweets, beverages, and organic staples with brands like Ferrero Rocher, Nestle, Haldirams, Bikano, Tetley, and 24 Letter Mantra contributing to 50 percent of overall units sold in this category. The standout though was Ferrero Rocher gift packs, which emerged as the most popular brand, accounting for 22% of units in the category.

Health and personal care witnessed a 4X growth in terms of overall units with FMCG brands being the top drivers. Surf Matic product range and feminine hygiene products were the top selling products in this category.

Apart from the major e-commerce platforms, the smaller, more niche platforms, and price comparison portal too witnessed growth.

Abhinav Choudhary, Co-founder Smartprix.com, an online price comparison portals and affiliate website, said, “We are already seeing more than 40 percent increase in visits of consumers on our portal for price comparison for Flipkart, Amazon, and Snapdeal due to festival times on day one.  More than 300 percent increase than last year’s festival time day one and 200 percent increase in traffic too.”

Airtel offering 4G data worth Rs 15000 with Apple iPhone 6S, 6S Plus

Bharti Airtel has announced it will sell the Apple iPhone 6S and 6S Plus through its retail outlets and is bundling the phones with over Rs 15000 worth of savings in 4G data costs. The phones are set to launch on October 16 across India.

Airtel is planning to offer the Apple iPhone 6S and 6S Plus at 235 of its stores all over India. 57 of those outfits are going to stay open all night on October 16 to cater to demand for the handsets. The telecom operator has further introduced an iPhone Infinity plan to entice potential customers.

As per the scheme, individuals will be provided with over 60GB of free 4G data for a period of 12 months. Airtel claims the initiative is worth Rs 15000. The company’s announcement comes a few days after Vodafone revealed its own voice and internet offers for the Apple devices.

The UK-based network provider is giving away Rs 8885 worth of freebies under its Vodafone Red 1299 Plan. It includes 3GB of 3G data, 1500 local or national text messages and 4000 local or STD minutes. The scheme is only applicable to postpaid consumers who purchase the iPhone 6S from Amazon via seller Cloudtail.

Also Read: iPhone 6S and 6S Plus cost more in India than abroad

Vodafone will also provide customers with a personal relationship manager. The plan is open till November 30. The price of the iPhone 6S starts at Rs 62000 for its 16GB model. It costs Rs 72000 and Rs 82000 for the 64GB and 128GB units, respectively. The 16GB, 64GB and 128GB iPhone 6S Plus can be bought in exchange of Rs 72000, Rs 82000 and Rs 92000, in that order.

Common specifications of the new iPhone handsets:

– Apple iOS 9 platform
– 2GB RAM, 16GB/64GB/128GB memory
– 2GHz dual-core Apple A9 processor
– 12MP rear camera, 5MP front snapper

Airtel has a temporary advantage over Vodafone as the latter is starting its 4G services in December this year. Users of the Apple iPhone 6S and 6S Plus will just have to decide if they would rather get only data from the former, or a range of freebies from the latter.

FreeCharge launches a top-up facility for smart card users of Mumbai Metro

Snapdeal owned digital platform for recharge and utility payments FreeCharge launched a top-up facility for smart card users of Mumbai Metro. With this new integration FreeCharge will enable Smart Card recharges on its website, Android, iOS and Windows app allowing users to recharge on the go, it said in a statement. Like any other payment of utility bills or recharges, commuters can recharge their stored value card where they only need to enter their unique smart card number which will lead to the payment gateways.

Once the recharge is successful the user will receive a message or mail. “We believe that this expansion is being leveraged by thousands of FreeCharge customers making their daily commute hassle free. We are looking forward to add new users to our database”. FreeCharge has recently launched a 100 per cent cashback offer for commuters wherein every recharge of Rs 100 and above will get Rs 100 cashback.

Mumbai Metro and FreeCharge aims to further promote the use of smart card for ease of life and commuting by launching many more exciting offers. FreeCharge facility is used for mobile prepaid, postpaid recharge, DTH and electricity bill payments for numerous utility service providers in addition to leading online and offline merchants. FreeCharge has 29.8 million registered users, and over 90 per cent of its transactions originate from mobile.

Freecharge is known for it’s growth story. Alok Goel, former CEO of Freecharge had said, “As a team, we are really proud that we could execute the largest M&A in the country and made FreeCharge a household name with millions of users who were not ‘recharging’ but ‘FreeCharging’.”