By Monalisa Sen
Women are increasingly buying online from an array of products both for themselves and for purposes of gifting to others.
A report titled “Online Shopping Trends of Gizmos & Gadgets in India”, put together by online e-tail portal Gizmobaba reveals that transactions made by women have increased to 40% compared to the 20% last year.
From a modest eight million in 2012, the number of people shopping online jumped over four-fold to 35 million last year, with small-town India and women scrambling to tap the promise of the Web. According to the study, the number is projected to grow further to 100 million by 2016, as customers increasingly seek to shop in the cozy comfort of a couch.
While women made up for 40% of the total online transactions last year, doubling from a year before, the share of sales from small towns, including Vijaywada, Guntur, Thrissur, Nanded, escalated to 30% in 2014 from a paltry 10% in the previous year. Importantly, with mobile penetration in the country rising very fast, transactions made with a mobile device witnessed a whopping five-fold rise within a year to a half of the total transactions in 2014, said the Gizmobaba report.
Increasing Internet penetration and growing preference for shopping online will drive the e-commerce market in India to $15 billion by 2016 with a whopping 100 million people going online to shop, says a Google study.
According to the Gizmobaba report, although transactions in the day time are 30% higher than those at night, a decent percentage of people still indulge in online shopping at night, mainly between 9 pm and 3 am. Online purchases at night are picking up because some of the customers, including professionals who work until the wee hours of the morning or the youth who surf the Internet at night, often shop at night. Conversations with the customers also revealed that they prefer to research, identify and compare products in the day time, often seeking opinions from friends and peers, and make the transaction later in the day from homes.
The report points out many large players, including Myntra, sought to capitalise on the rising trend of sales at night by offering midnight flash sales. The proliferation of affordable smartphones and Internet, aided by tech-savvy youth even in remote towns, is contributing to the spread of e-commerce and m-commerce.
Gizmobaba chief executive and founder of Alok Chawla said, “Online shopping has seen a lot of progress in the ecosystem in the last couple of years. These insights have immensely helped us understand our target segment better and accordingly bring them products that cater for their latent needs.”
For instance, he said, demand for gizmos and gadgets for women is now nearly just as high as that of men, prompting the e-tail portal to bring in a wide array of products designed for women, including Hair Epilators, refillable perfume atomisers, gas leak detectors, egg crackers, drink dispensers, engraver pen, clothes folding board
