Safdar Khan, Sr. Manager Marketing, Videocon mobile phones
India’s current internet user base is of 350 million, which is more than the total population of the US, and is expected to grow 500 million by 2017. This user base ironically forms the top strata of the society – SEC A, which is keeping Indian consumption story growing. This has brought a paradigm shift in retailing in India in a big way. Indian retail has evolved and kept pace with the technology from local baniya shop to organized retail now to online retail. “E-tailing” as it is known, is growing with a phenomenal rate. India’s overall retail industry is estimated at $600 billion in 2015 and is expected to grow to $1 trillion by 2020 and chunk of it is going to the emerging E-commerce, which is growing at an astronomical rate of more than 50% YoY. Q1-2015 saw seven Indian E-commerce companies have managed to crack a billion-dollar club – Flipkart, Snapdeal, InMobi, Quikr, OlaCabs, and Paytm.
One can now order groceries and book a home using E-commerce apps on his/her smartphone. With the increase in internet usage and especially the mobile and wireless internet usage e – commerce companies mainly through mobile apps are targeting the users with various offers and freebies. Many manufacturers also jumped the bandwagon by using the e-portals for exclusively launching and selling their products. These producers are using mass media instruments like Print (Newspapers, Magazines) and Electronic Media (TV & Internet) in a greater frequency and volume to drive the customers to their products. Every other day we find our newspapers cluttered with front page ads and our popular TV channels whether it’s a General Entertainment or Sports or News airing the e- comm. offers. This is in a sense also assisting traditional Brick and Mortar stores by making end users aware about the product and its embedded feature. These communications targeted at the senses of intended buyers driving them to purchase the goods or services offered. Many of them will then go to a retailer in the vicinity see the product, take a look and feel of the stuff, compares the pricing, bargains over it, gets retailers assurance and recommendation for the product and buys it from retail outlet itself.
Furthermore, E- com Portals allows a retailer / Distributor to register and sell the products online, thus giving them another channel to liquidate their products. In a way it’s creating an SMART Retailer , who is omnipresent in the retail space, garnering the advantage of both the arena. This phenomenon is here to stay in India and with the advent of 4G and enhanced smartphone and internet usage, it’s going to have exponential growth. This is further fueled by availability of wireless internet in vast reaches of countryside and urban areas.
So, just relax and watch, it is evolving on your smartphone device as you read this article!!!