India’s festive shopping updates are full of large growth numbers. The more useful question for brands is what those numbers actually measure: more customers, more orders, higher prices or a temporary rush towards discounts.
CashKaro’s latest shopping figures put merchandise value routed through the cashback platform at ₹1,003.3 crore during October 7–12, across 38 lakh orders. Average order value reached ₹2,639, compared with ₹1,100 in an ordinary six-day period. The roughly 18-fold increase in merchandise value is a comparison with normal trading, not last year’s festive sales.
That distinction changes how the growth should be read.
More orders can come with a smaller bill
A separate Unicommerce analysis found order volumes up 31% from the comparable opening festive-sales week last year. Merchandise value rose 17%, while average order value fell 10%.
Its sample covered more than 33 million order items processed through Uniware, comparing October 7–13, 2026 with September 22–28, 2025. Quick-commerce order volumes grew 85%, and Tier-III towns accounted for 42% of orders.
CashKaro and Unicommerce are observing different transactions against different baselines. A shopper can spend more during a sale than on an ordinary day while the average order across another platform’s merchants falls from last year. Neither dataset, on its own, measures all Indian household spending.
The business implication is practical: a higher order count does not automatically mean a higher-value basket or more profit. Product mix, discounts, delivery costs and repeat buying still determine how much of that activity becomes a durable gain for a seller.
Fashion’s momentum does not settle the electronics question
Myntra’s latest update adds another view. Myntra head Sharon Pais said orders had grown more than 30% year-on-year since April. The company said its festival’s first-day demand was four times normal levels, with more than half of orders coming from Tier-II and Tier-III cities. Its opening-day average order value was also above last year’s.
Those company figures suggest that growth beyond the metros can coexist with higher average spending per order. They do not establish the same pattern in every category.
In smartphones, Counterpoint Research’s pre-season outlook projects a 12% annual decline in units during October 8–November 8, but a 5% rise in market value. It attributes the pressure on volumes to higher memory costs and device prices, with financing and trade-ins supporting purchases. This is a forecast for the full festive window, not a completed sales tally.
The useful measure comes after the headline
Taken together, the updates point to an uneven market with different patterns: more orders with smaller average baskets in one dataset, higher-value fashion orders in another, and a smartphone outlook shaped by higher prices and affordability offers.
For brands, the next test is whether festive traffic produces repeat customers and healthy margins once the sale ends. Comparing the same category, channel and festive window will say more about that than combining the largest growth figures from different platforms.
The Crunch
Festive sales need like-for-like comparisons. More orders, larger baskets and stronger profits are different measures.