point

June - 2014 - issue > CEO Viewpoint

The Age of the Indian E-tailers

Pawan Verma
Group CEO-Knowsys Ecom Private Limited
Friday, June 6, 2014
Pawan Verma
KnowSys Ecom Private Limited is a subsidiary of KnowSys Group and owns online portals like Shopuli among others. Based out of Mumbai, the company commenced its operation in the year 2007.

We are a fortunate generation as we are not only living in the age of many revolutions; we are also participating in shaping up the course of their development in one way or the other. The e-Commerce revolution is a case in point. This disruptive innovation, enabling the products and service providers to overcome the limitations of time & space and vend their products & services right inside the living rooms of their customers, has unsettled the traditional methods of marketing and is fueling the rapid growth of the sector across geographies in developed and developing economies around the world. The emergence of e-tailing as an off-shoot of e-Commerce is also transforming the retail market space with India being among the hot-beds of this experimentation.

The e-tailing Ecosystem
There are three basic factors critical to the growth of e-tailing in any economy - internet density, quality of internet penetration and the depth of internet usage. Fortunately, on all these three counts, the e-tailing ecosystem in India has been witnessing quantum jumps. The internet penetration which was just 50 million in 2008 grew to 120 million by the year 2012. In terms of the quality of internet connections, even though the number of broadband connections happens to be around 15 percent only, seen in terms of the number of users, it acquires significance. The browsing behavior of the Indian netizens has also been undergoing qualitative changes. While internet usage was mainly confined to mails and news initially, today, a sizeable population of Indians is using internet for diverse activities like, gaming, shopping, social media, internet banking and others.

Growth of e-tailing
Even though e-tailing accounts for just around 0.1 percent of the total retail business in India today, there are factors pointing to a very positive growth-chart for this sector :
1) The rapid evolution of the e-tailing ecosystem in India

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