Holy Cow! Online demand for cow dung cakes up 40% this Diwali

Priyanka Sahaymoneycontrol
If you thought, ‘hing, churan and besan’ were becoming popular as products on e-commerce sites, this Diwali, you may be up for a surprise!

Call it the Modi effect or going back to the basics, online shopping firms such as Shopclues and Amazon are selling in-demand things such as gau mutra (cow’s urine) and cow dung cakes on their platform, this festive season.

While the 500 ml urine bottle is available on Shopclues for Rs.199, cow dung cakes are available on Shopclues and Amazon both.

According to Nitin Agarwal, Assistant Vice President and the Head of Marketing of Shopclues, while these products are not added with an intention of differentiating the company from other e-commerce firms, but largely because the Indian customer is looking for these products.

As per its website, Amazon is selling it as Rs.195 for a pack of 11 piece of cakes of 200 gram each. Shopclues too is selling these cakes with price ranging from around Rs.150 to 200 for different sized packets, according to its website.

Though there is demand, sourcing quality sellers of cow dung cakes is a challenge, ecommerce companies say. “It is more about sourcing the products, because there are very few sellers who are making these products and making these in an organized way. Getting those sellers on board is more of a challenge,” Agarwal said.

Shopclues claims to be getting massive demand for both the urine bottles and cakes from people with origin from Tier 2, 3 cities. According to the company these products are largely used for religious purposes.

As compared to the last year the demand for cow dung cakes have increased 40 percent, on Shopclues, said Agarwal.

Religious items are amongst the hot-selling categories this Diwali season. Among other products available on the Shopclues are electronic havan kund, nazar suraksha kawach and lakshmi yantra.

High priced religious items are also in demand. “Rudraksha and Mahameru Yantra are hot selling on our website,” says Goonjan Mall, CEO of Online Prasad, a religious ecommerce website.

“Our average ticket size is Rs 2000 for Rudraksha and Rs 4000 for a Mahameru Yantra,” he adds.

Shopclues claims that the maximum percent of commission comes from this category. While it gets close to 5 percent on electronics, close to 15 percent on home and lifestyle, this ‘unstructured’ category fetches the firm around 20 percent commission. Overall Shopclues claims to have 500,000 merchants on the platform. Total order value from this category is about 3 percent on horizontal e-commerce websites. “But it drives a lot of virality and helps the portal become a go to destination for the customers,” Agarwal of Shopclues adds.