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Google announced about the discontinuation of annual Great Online Shopping Festival (GOSF) due to rising popularity of e-commerce sites like Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart, hosting self versions of Diwali sales. Google’s GOSF was an answer from India to the popular ‘Cyber Monday’ sales in the US.

Nitin Bawankule, Director of Google India Industry, wrote in a blog that, “Today, India has many flourishing and successful e-commerce companies and there are multiple deal days being hosted by various e-commerce players delivering great value to shoppers across India.”

He opined that there is no need for the users to wait for a 12-month period to obtain deals online. Moreover, medium businesses and small businesses do not have to wait for www.gosf.in for finding customers from all through India.

“There were many learnings for us and the industry on the whole but the time has come for us to bid adieu to the Great Online Shopping Festival,” Bawankule wrote.

As per the estimation from Google, India only had 130 million Internet users when it introduced GOSF in 2012 and only 8 million were shopping online. The value of the total online shopping industry then was nearly $2 billion.

Just after three years, over 350 million Internet users are there in India and nearly some 50 million online shoppers. The industry crossed $10 billion in size and the projected number of online shoppers by 2016 is 100 million.

-Sumana