BENGALURU: Indian eCommerce major Flipkart said that sales on its platform were led by shoppers from the NCR region closely followed by metros Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad in 2016 in its annual #FlipTrends2016 report. Among the tier-2 cities, Guwahati and Jorhat in North East India were first time entrants to the top gainers list; amongst other tier 2 cities Mysore, Salem, and Tirupur from South India led sales in the smartphones category. South India emerged yet again as the most tech-savvy region, accounting for over 35 per cent sales, while North stood at 28 per cent, West at 22 per cent, and East India at 15 per cent.

Flipkart Head – Mobiles Ajay Yadav said, “The popularity of smartphones in India, as clearly indicated by #FlipTrends, highlight the shift consumers are making towards 4G enabled smartphones. Today consumers are opting for brands and models that could not just offer them the features, but were smart on the pocket as well.”

Yadav further added, “More of our customers are choosing Flipkart as their preferred platform of choice when it comes to shopping for mobiles. Industry-first innovations such as No Cost EMI and Easy Product Exchange, along with exclusive brand partnerships and flash sales, have helped us to maintain the market leadership in this segment.”

The IOT category of smart bands and smart watches saw tremendous growth of over 500 per cent from 2015 reveals the report. Top sellers in this category were Apple, Motorola, and Samsung.

Attributing more than 50 per cent of its sales to mobile phones because of affordable 4G smartphones from national and international brands, the report says that the smartphones category in India continues to be one of the most hotly contested arenas in online shopping. Redmi 3S Prime, Redmi Note 3, Moto E 3 Power, and Lenovo K5 and Samsung J5 were the top 5 bestselling mobile phones of the year says the seven point annual report. Lenovo, MI, Samsung, Motorola, and LeEco remained the most favourite brands.

Analysing online shopping of over 10 crore or 100 million customers across India, #FlipTrends2016 recorded data collected from online shoppers over 2016 across all Flipkart-owned platforms.