Why is E-commerce on a roll in India?

Monday December 12, 2011 , 2 min Read

We at Yourstory have been keeping a keen eye on the E-commerce space especially the spur in ecommerce entrepreneurship and we’ve been crunching a few numbers as well. With E-sparks just around the corner, many asked us why is E commerce becoming the hot bed of entrepreneurship in India currently. While there are many reasons, we enumerate one indicator here for you.The reasons are plenty but we like making co-relations and while going through some stats we landed upon a possible answer. It is not unknown that 83% of all the statistics are made up and more often than not, the number used to describe this is also made up. This changes things a bit and now 83.01% of the statistics are made up! But be that as it may, to lend our answer some credibility, we fetched the latest data from the UN database. It can’t get more serious, can it?

So, we went and checked the numbers for the time it takes to set up a business in different countries and the internet penetration in these countries. The numbers amused us and maybe they'll give you some food for thought as well.

Internet Users per 100 inhabitants
Country	Brazil	China	India	Pakistan	Singapore	USA
2007	30.88	16	3.95	10.15	68	75
2010	40.65	34.3	7.5	16.78	70	79

Time Required to start a business
Country	Brazil	China	India	Pakistan	Singapore	USA
2007	152	40	30	24	4	6
2008	152	35	33	24	5	6

We figured some don't like data too much. So here's the visualization:

So, it shows the opposite picture you'd say but you'd be wrong because there's a tiny point that starting up a venture on the net doesn’t mandate you to do the time consuming things before you begin. You do it along the way as it comes. And the tiniest bars in the first chart might give a disheartening picture but when we factor in the population, the growth is huge. The tiniest red line in chart amounts to about a 100 million people! With the smartphone sales picking up, internet booming and as the Indian diaspora starts to get more comfortable with online transactions, there’s no reason why the Ecommerce market shouldn't thrive. One might call it the silver lining but well, there are different ways of looking at the lining too. We just thought this to be one of the ways.

Come on December 17 and be a part of this movement. Block your seat for E-Sparks 2011. Register here.

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