Online shopper spends less than nine minutes per visit

An online shopper spends less than nine minutes per visit on an e-retail platform and browses more than 20 product pages before making a purchase.

Over the past year, consumer engagement with online platforms has increased, according to a report on "How India Shops Online" by Bain and Company in collaboration with Flipkart.

Online shoppers browse more than 20 product pages before making a purchase. For some categories, such as mobile phones and women's ethnic wear, consumers browse about 50 to 60 product pages before making a purchase, the report said.

The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated consumers' need for safety and convenience, leading to an inflection in global e-commerce penetration-and even in India, online shopping is gaining salience.

The $850 billion Indian retail market is the fourth largest in the world and is largely unorganised. This market is on the cusp of a transformation, led by the emergence of e-retail and its growing influence on Indian shoppers.

One in two visitors browse the image gallery, and only 1 in 15 click the detailed product description. Also, vernacular searches are gaining popularity: For example, "parda" was one of the top three searches in curtains.

India's online-shopping landscape comprises a diverse mix of city tiers and income ranges, forming a microcosm of the pan-Indian retail market.

Online shoppers in tier-2 cities and smaller municipalities make up nearly half of all shoppers and contribute to three out of every five orders for leading e-retail platforms. These customers from tier-2 and smaller cities buy similar categories of products as customers from metropolises or tier-1 cities with only a marginal difference in average selling price, as per the report.

For sellers (kiranas, artisans, traders and homemakers), it will provide an unprecedented impetus by establishing easy access to a large base of customers across the country and keeping their stores running 24x7. With access to more than 95 per cent of India's PIN codes, e-retail has already democratised the shopping landscape, empowering small sellers while breaking the go-to-market barriers for insurgent and incumbent brands.

"We expect Indian e-retail to reach massive scale spurred by cheap, ubiquitous mobile data enabling nearly 1 billion Internet users by 2030, growing online spending by digital natives, and supply-side innovations such as vernacular-based user interfaces, voice and visual search," the report said.

"We expect fashion categories to play a critical role in acquiring online customers, similar to the mature markets of the US and China. The Indian e-retail market is primed to reach nearly 300 million to 350 million shoppers over the next five years, propelling the online gross merchandise value to $100 billion to 120 billion by 2025," it added.

( With inputs from IANS )