gosf IS today

Great Online Shopping Festival is pitched as an event to bring new users in the Internet community to become online shoppers. The event is also pitched as a Cyber Monday equivalent for India. That’s a very optimistic thought. I applaud the thought, but there is a pessimistic me and this is what he thinks:

1. Indian eCommerce companies are always playing the discount game. Wonder how this really makes sense apart from being another marketing move.

2. The idea is to make non-online shopping Internet users to start keying in their card details and make online purchases. How does an additional discount beat the fear or trust factor. Are we saying there is a price for it. 

3. How difficult is it for a customer to postpone his purchases for 12.12.12 (the D day) for that additional incentive. The bigger question I guess is are we ending up creating a make up market that is going to disappear from tomorrow.

4. How is everyone going to follow up to validate the hypothesis? Did we really increase the pie of online shoppers in the Internet ecosystem?

5. …and I am sure there are more questions (place them as comments to this post). 

Side Note: True that Google is spending a lot of money on glorifying gosf, but what is the revenue it might be garnering making companies fight for this new space. At the outset, great marketing move by Google to push well-funded eCommerce companies to inflate their spends.