In India, the vast majority of consumers are turning to m-commerce to buy their products and services online.
E-commerce has always been somewhat unpredictable in India, but Indian mobile shopping appears to be taking off with a vengeance. For instance, despite the fact that Flipkart broke the 100 million user mark two months ago, its valuation recently fell by another 38 percent.
That said, while online shopping may be somewhat unstable, mobile commerce looks much more steady.
Current Indian mobile shopping trends suggest that the market will bring in $48 billion in 2020. Furthermore, recent Regalix research indicates that 83 percent of Indian consumers prefer to use their smartphones. This makes m-commerce the most popular online shopping channel in the country.
The same research showed that mobile commerce users in India are primarily within certain age groups. Interestingly, people between the ages of 25 and 34 years were more likely to use their smartphones to shop than those from 18 to 24 years old. In fact, 90 percent of online shoppers in that first age category prefer mobile.
Overall, Indian mobile shopping statistics show that 1 in 3 people in the country is shopping with a smartphone.
The Regalix report showed that exactly one third – 33 percent – of shoppers in India shop over mobile commerce at least one time per month. This option provides them with a broad spectrum of options and allows for convenient price comparison no matter where the consumer happens to be.
Another 28 percent of Indian shoppers shop even more frequently than that, once per week. One in four consumers – 25 percent – shop over mobile phone at least once per three months. Only 14 percent of participants said they shopped online over their mobile devices once per year.
One noteworthy Indian mobile shopping trend pointed out by the Regalix report had to do with who was shopping. Men appeared to be using mobile phones to shop more than women. Forty four percent of women were shopping at least once per month over mobile. At the same time, 63 percent of men were buying products and services over their smartphones.
Smartphones are rapidly taking over a larger share of the purchases that are being made over the internet.
According to recent statistics, it looks as though it won’t be very long before nearly all of the online shopping going on in India will be made up of mobile commerce based activities.
This data is according to one of the largest e-commerce companies in India, Snapdeal.com.
Snapdeal.com is now predicting that 90 percent of its orders will be purchased on its websites by users of smartphones, as those mobile devices become more affordable and make it possible for a growing number of people to reach the internet. This will bring millions of new customers exclusively to their website via mobile commerce. That marketplace has already been seeing massive increases in its figures as a result of this channel.
Mobile commerce will, therefore, become the most important online shopping channel in India in two years.
Over the last year, Snapdeal.com, which is an online marketplace backed by eBay, has experienced a rise in m-commerce based purchases that has brought it to the point that it is now thirty times larger than it had been only twelve months ago. It has already reached the point in which nearly 70 percent of its orders are already being made by consumers who are accessing the websites by way of smartphones and tablets. According to the chief executive and co-founder of Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl, that percentage will only continue to increase.
Bahl explained that “It’s a tsunami of users over mobile phones.” He also expressed that approximately 65 percent of the consumers who make purchases over mobile devices are first time users of the site. The majority of those new years are in younger demographics and reside in smaller cities and towns across India in which broadband internet service has not yet become the standard., said Bahl.
Many of the users who make purchases via mobile commerce also do not have credit cards. For this reason, they take advantage of the opportunity to be able to have their purchases shipped to them, at which time they pay through cash on delivery.
