Inside India’s expanding digital commerce landscape
Amidst the dominance of Flipkart and Amazon, the D2C market in India exploded last year, with hundreds of new brands, products, and business models expanding the overall digital commerce pie.
Suman Singh
Thursday March 11, 2021 , 3 min Read
India aims to become a $5 trillion economy by 2025, but this goal wouldn’t be attainable without the growth of digital commerce, which includes ecommerce, and newer offshoots like D2C commerce and social commerce.
Amidst the dominance of and , the D2C market in India exploded last year, with hundreds of new brands, products, and business models expanding the overall digital commerce pie.
COVID-19 has given a push to online transactions and people are buying into newer categories. Hence, more experiments are likely, and India is projected to have over 3,000 D2C brands by 2025. Over 150 million people are said to be transacting on D2C platforms.
Even though digital commerce currently accounts for only about 4 percent of India’s overall retail market, the future looks promising, with traditional players beginning to make inroads into the space.
In 2020, Reliance launched its offline-to-online retail marketplace JioMart, while earlier this year, the acquired online grocer for $1.2 billion, further expanding the scope of digital commerce in the country.
The Interview
With increased digitisation due to COVID-19, going global has become slightly easier and cheaper. CEO Sourabh Gupta shares that demand for AI-enabled voice products is growing, and the sector is expected to be a $35-50 billion opportunity by 2025. He believes that the world is heading towards a voice-led future as a billion people move online.
Editor’s Pick: 100x Entrepreneur
Arun Venkatachalam has always been interested in financial services. The angel investor has backed 25+ companies, including , Zoomcar, , and , among others, to date. In this podcast, he shares insights about early investments (Posist and Yourbus), and why he believes in investing deep into a particular sector once he’s taken a bet. Read more.
Startup Spotlight
Samunnati solves the working capital needs of smallholder farmers, agri-SMEs
In India, smallholder farmers are not only under massive debts, but only 11 percent of them have access to organised lenders and farm loans. To solve this, veteran banker Anilkumar SG founded Samunnati, an agri-fintech startup that works towards improving market linkages, makes credit more accessible to farmers and agribusinesses, and helps agriculture become more efficient. Read more.
Infographic: YS Design
News & Updates
- CEO Elon Musk made $25.1 billion in one day, setting a new record. This was facilitated by the 20 percent hike in Tesla's share price. Elon Musk's overall wealth now stands at $174 billion, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
- chief Vijay Shekhar Sharma has confirmed that the fintech giant was applying to constitute a New Umbrella Entity in partnership with several players, including Ola, aiming to develop innovative digital payments solutions.
- OYO Hotels and Homes has received a term loan of $200 million from SoftBank to scale and accelerate innovation across OYO’s core capabilities, including proprietary technology, revenue-management suite, and data analytics.
- Edtech startup aims to add 2,500 employees to its current 6,000-member team, hiring across functions such as product, technology, academics, business, and marketing.
- India's EV financing industry is projected to be worth Rs 3.7 lakh crore in 2030, about 80 percent of the current retail vehicle finance industry, according to a new report prepared by NITI Aayog and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) India.
Before you go, stay inspired with…
“Brands growing in D2C segments are focussed not only on innovative products and finding the right voice for their brand but also on customer experience and their feedback.”
Now get the Daily Capsule in your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter today!
