Social media tools like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, Buzz etc. introduced a fun element in teaching. Don’t be surprised I am not going to talk about education in India. Actually these tools helped India to raise its computer literacy rate from single digit to double digit, which is one of the important factor to promote etailing in India. I will give credit to IRCTC & Makemytrip for making Indian consumer more comfortable in doing online transactions, but will appreciate social media tools how they boosted “e” presence in India.
The volume of online sale is still less but this mode of shopping is catching popularity through word of mouth, and retailers are bidding on ecommerce growth. Thus we can see “Future group” online shopping destination as www.futurebazaar.com, “Shoppers stop” virtual shop as www.Shopperstop.com and www.themobilestore.in of “The mobile store”.
By the way India has its virtual stores since mid 90’s, and the players like “IndiaMart” and “Fabmall” now known as “Indiaplaza” are among those who established a stepping stone for ecommerce in India. Now we have many such online shops where you can find anything ranging from furniture to T-Shirts and books to gadgets such as www.homeshop18.com, www.shopmania.in, shopping @ sify, rediff and indiatimes, www.retailsdirect.com, www.indiavarta.com, eshop.webindia123.com etc but they lack leading brands. They have “Your brand dual sim phone” but not a “Philip DVD player”, but with retailers opening their online store things are changing but they still have very limited merchandise on their online shop. I hope soon we can see range of branded merchandise from Levis Jeanswear to Titan watch.
After doing some research I was able to draw a profile of Indian shopper - An Indian Online shopper is a “male” of age between “18- 35”, is a graduated doing job and prefer to shop from its work location. Women still prefer brick and mortar store and don’t want to miss trails and store ambience.
Recently Google also launched their shopping tool for google.co.in domain where you can search your product and can see results from all this online shops. All these things indicating a detour for shopping – an online store – new shopping avenue for Indian Shoppers.
- Prateek Katiyar
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April 15th, 2010 at 8:28 pm
A good article that gives insight to online shopping in India. However general all the listed online websites are; I would love to see online websites that just particularly cater to an individual product/category (for eg: just apparel + accessories, exclusive electronics store, etc). What would you think about it? Do you think e-commerce will further pick-up in the future?
April 16th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
There is long way ahead of e commerce in india, but it will ride the path on Ferrari. See around you, everyone has a mobile, every third person a pc and every fifth person a good online presence/profile. If you compare this with 5 years ago scenario the things are totally changed, so do the face of the future, it will be having “e” written all over it. With such a picture i think you will see more online transaction as well as more retailers with their virtual stores. Have a look on global ecommerce, we have specility retailers like “LVMH”,home decor like “homedepot”, electronic retailers like “bestbuy”, and even supermarkets like “tesco” etc all having a dedicated online store for selling merchandise. As soon as we reach that kind of standards we will be seeing that actions being replicated in india. Even this point in time we have speciality retailer’s online presence like “themobilestore”, “croma” etc. but soon be finding apparel, accessories with their e-signature. What i can say is the time U.S. market took to reach this point, our Indian market will take much less then that. So be prepared may be next time you browse for some product it will be available to buy online and will get delivered to your home doorstep the next day
April 27th, 2010 at 11:08 am
I def agree with your opinion/viewpoint. The time India took to take its market few notches above has been quicker than most markets. To me its a small initiative every retailer should make to take it to the next level and give a futuristic allure offering to the customers. Guess we are on the same page as far as this is concerned?!?!