A recent report generated by the Wall Street Journal revealed that five years down the line, almost all of online shopping that will take place in India will be done through smartphones and other mobile devices.
According to the leading ecommerce company in India, Snapdeal.com, in the next two years 90% of its orders will be coming from the people who buy through their mobile devices they way smartphones are becoming more affordable and bringing the Internet to millions of new customers.
In fact as revealed by Kunal Bahl, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Snapdeal to the Wall Street Journal, about 70% of the purchase orders are already from cell phones and tablets. As discussed above he expects this percentage to climb even more.
He was quoted in the report as saying, “It’s a tsunami of new users over mobile phones.”
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At the same time, the fact that online marketplace saw more than a 30-fold increase in sales on mobile devices in just over a year was backed by eBay.
The report also revealed that almost 65% of consumers who bought over mobile devices in recent months were first-time users. Moreover, a large part of this percentage is comprised of young shoppers from small towns and cities in India where broadband connectivity is still very unreliable and access to personal computers is also limited. And, this cash on delivery (COD) option has even done better in improving the ecommerce scenario in India by enabling all those users who do not have credit cards to do ecommerce.
With more than 900 million mobile phone users, India is the second-largest mobile phone market in the world!
Although the percentage of smartphones used in the country is only around ten but that the number is growing rapidly. According to many analysts the number of Smartphone users in India is likely to jump to five times of what it is now, which will certainly bolster the country’s nascent online retail industry.
The augmentation in the popularity of messaging apps and social media sites is making more and more Indians to shell out for smartphones and data connections. People simply can’t resist the this trend that has become more like a fever or a mania and the idea is that things will only get bigger and better with time in this case.
On this Bahl added, “That’s what is getting people online and once they are online they are buying.”
Having identified this trend marketers are not only using it to their advantage but devising ways to promote it more and more. In fact, since last year a lot of marketers through advertisements are trying to target more people to use their mobile app if any, the names include mainly the ecommerce companies like Snapdeal that has dedicated a nearly a third of its 300+ engineering and product team to focus exclusively on improving the customer’s mobile experience.
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