Ecommerce in India

Ecommerce in India is a much talked about topic nowadays. As the world looks into the growth story of India and its huge consumption opportunity, India is building the basic infrastructure required for supporting a huge population. Organised retail has just begun to happen and one sees a lot of Malls and different formats of Retail stores and chains offering variety of products.

Natural extention to this is Ecommerce, buying and selling. The internet penetration is slower than the mobile phone penetration, but the behaviour is going through a cultural and mindset change from buyer’s perspective. Some of the areas where buying on the Internet is quite evident is travel sector ie air, train, bus ticketing. Shopping engines have just started offering Price comparison features but they are surely in an early stage of this market development. There are lots of business model to catch up in various categories of products to be sold.

But there are certain areas to be addressed in ecommerce business :

1. logistics - Shipping has to be efficient and priced on transaction volumes.

2. Whole Sale - Drop Shipping business models have to be established

3. Returns - Return policies have to be very customer friendly

4. Payment Gateways - Price of these transactions have to be minimum and PayPal and Checkout type of models have to be adopted

5. Marketing - Affiliate marketing and various other Online marketing methods to be adopted

Once the above areas gets addressed,  one could see a big Industry emerging here. The likes of Ebay, Amazon, 1800flowers, petmeds, etc will eventually be taking shape in India as well.