India's Shopping Online; Ecommerce Trends this Diwali
This festive season, if your inbox is full with mailers from ecommerce companies making an attempt to explain to you that the 200 Rs off on that blue tee is really worth giving a shot, you are not alone. The competition among the biggies is cutthroat, leave alone the small players. We at YourStory have tracked the ecommerce segment right from its genesis, and have observed amazing trends emerge. We have seen Flipkart start with selling just books online and go on to sell men's clothing. We have seen the likes Jabong getting incubated at international incubators like RocketInternet, and introducing brilliant innovation in the form of “create a look online” feature. We have also seen smaller players emerge out of the dark and create a name for themselves. We expected that “niche” would come out big, and it indeed go that way. In recent news, we saw Myntra buy out Sher Singh for an undisclosed amount. Although no one can accurately predict what the future has in store, the past is said to reveal a lot about the future. Hence, this festive season, we take some time out and put before you the segment from an outsider’s perspective.
ShopClues.com is an agile player in the ecommerce segment, and being highly data-focused, has researched deeply into the segment. Here are some insights into the ecommerce scene in India based upon a study of 100,000 transactions on ShopClues during the months of October and November’12:
The metro crowd seems to have caught up on the commerce trend it seems. But some of the Tier2/3 cities also are catching up quickly on the trend. Cities such as Rajkot, Guwahati and Bhatinda have saved for themselves a top slot as cities slowly by steadily getting a hang of the ecommerce scene.
Books were what the ecommerce saga started with, but the crowd has moved on to buying deodorants, kitchenware, mobile phones, and tablets online. The top categories for ecommerce include mobile phones and computer peripherals as well.
Although Apple products are more known to be sold by the Authorised Resellers at the various outlets, it has come up as a major brand the products of which are considerably purchased online. Samsung is not very far here as well, followed by Reebok and Adidas. An amazing discovery here is of Tupperware sales increasing over ecommerce; seems the Indian women have finally taken to purchasing kitchen items online.
Some other insights into the ecommerce purchases near the festive season include:
- 2nd tier brands and products from SMBs are more popular than top brands & large sellers
- Tier 2 & 3 cities combined together comprise more than 50% of total online shopping
- Customers have some resistance buying some higher ASP items, unless it’s a planned purchase
- Prepaid payment option and EMI facility are slowly gaining traction
- 3PLs are handling higher volume with lesser mistakes
[Source: Shopclues.com. ShopClues ships in over 7k cities across India and has thousands of online stores. At this time, ShopClues has over 125K products or 525k SKUs and over 1,500 brands spreading over 600 categories or 15 Meta categories. ShopClues is funded by institutional investors, is an Indian subsidiary of Clues Network Inc., a US Corporation and is based out of Gurgaon.]
