E-commerce has been a new buzzword over the last decade and is likely to grow exponentially every year in a developing country like India. But the fact is, it is expected that e-commerce might catch-up with the growth in overall trade market. This can be estimated from the fact that e-commerce saturation is still quite lower even amongst active internet users in India who look for information regarding products. According to a report, 40% of internet users in India use e-commerce websites to find the price of product.
One of the most interesting e-commerce statistics revealed by Google is, 67 percent of e-commerce happens on mobile devices and as many as 40% of all Google searches in India are done using mobile phones.
According to IAMAI report, 80% market share of current online commerce industry is dominated by travel business and remaining 20% share constitutes of non-travel businesses such as electronic retailing, digital download, paid content subscription, financial services, online classifieds, etc. The statistics also reveal that, online travel industry is dominating the online e-commerce industry since last 5 years. However, online users in India have exhibited willingness to make purchases over the internet, which is evident from the increasing awareness and growth of net commerce industry.
Currently, online travel industry is dominated by domestic air ticket booking (63%), which is followed by online Railway tickets (28%).
Electronic retailing is also growing very fast in India. This year electronics items like mobile phones, laptops, cameras, home appliances, personal products like apparels and jewelery and other accessories had a market share of worth Rs. 2,550 crore, which is expected to grow by 30% next year.
Economic Times has published the unique visitors of major categories of e-commerce portals in India, which might surprise you. Among the categories that catch our attention includes coupons (deal sites like dealsandyou.com, jeetle.in, snapdeal.com etc). These sites have seen great improvement from last year. However, the most shocking among these all, the book category (websites like Flipkart), has shrunk. In addition to coupons category, apparel, movies, jewelery/luxury goods have also recorded rapid growth in 2011.