In India, the e-commerce sector in the festive sale period (between mid-October to November) clocked INR 58,000 in gross merchandise value (GMV) compared to INR 35,000 – up around 65% from the previous year.

8.8 crore e-commerce shoppers (compared to 4.7 crores – up around 88% from the previous year), with 45% coming from Tier I cities and 55% from Tier 2 & 3 towns.

Flipkart Group (including Flipkart & Myntra) comprised 66% of the overall GMV, followed by Amazon. Both these players combined captured 88% market share.  

Besides deep discounts, offers and convenience, pent up demand by customers because of Covid and hesitation to go to offline stores because of health & safety concerns helped drive growth.

Smartphones sales (46% of overall GMV) continued to dominate across all the products, followed by Electronics and large appliances saw a jump, clocking 29% of the overall GMV. Home & Home Furnishing Categories did very well whereas Fashion Category declined to 13% of overall GMV (compared to 16% last year).

Though there is big jump in number of e-commerce buyers, the GMV per customer dropped to ?6,600 from ?7,450 last year.

As of today, around 20% of world shops online and the retail e-commerce sales may cross USD 5 trillon by 2021. In US, now the e-commerce sales may touch USD 800bn this year which is almost 16% of total retail sales. According to IBM’s US Retail Index, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift away from physical stores to e-commerce by almost five years. The sales of non-essential retailers declined by 75% in 2nd quarter of 2020. Probably it’s time for retailers to pivot to omnichannel fulfillment capabilities to survive and grow. Only the time will tell if this pandemic -driven e-commerce growth is just a temporary shift in consumer behaviour or will it have a long-term permanent behavioural change.