Indian Ecommerce industry is rapidly growing and also capturing the interest of audience. Although, India did have the presence of matrimony sites and job portals since 1996-97, the real growth of this sector came in 2005-06 with the entry of online travel agencies such as makemytrip.com and yatra.com which revolutionized the travel industry by offering instant booking and comprehensive choices. The early level entry into Ecommerce industry gave E-Travel a market share of 71%.
Entry of travel sites was then later followed by online retail stores such as Flipkart and Myntra in 2007-08. By offering attractive deals and discounts and hassle-free shopping experience, this sector picked up pace in the next 3 years and is on explosive growth path ever since. Since then we are seeing the expansion of this sector while including financial services, survey sites, data processing, B2B relation portals etc.
If we particularly look into E-Retailing, it has expanded nine folds from its infancy since 2007 to 2014 and is projected to increase at a CAGR of 50% by 2016. Some major reasons for the growth of this sector includes rise in Internet usage, higher disposable income and also smart phone penetration. Moreover, this sector is also characterized by huge options, low pricing and also fast shipping. The sector is also seeing continuous growth with improvement in quality services offered such as same day delivery and also premium service packs. In fact there are few firms operating in a specific niche to target a specific audience while committed to deliver best services and become a renowned name in the industry.
Similar to any high growing and cash-intensive sector, Ecommerce industry has been experiencing a consolidation in the past 2-3 years, which is estimated to speed up only in next 2-3 years. Such consolidations are taking place primarily through merger and acquisitions in which the large players are acquiring the smaller ones in order to consolidate their position in this growing sector. In the past 4 months between February and May 2014, there have been 3 rounds of PE/VC funding and 3 million dollar acquisitions.
If we talk of the career opportunities in this sector, there are myriad of options available for a whole host of professionals that can find their niche in this industry. Manu Moga, VP and head of musafir.com rightly speaks, “Exceedingly, marketers in the e-commerce space will have to play the role of publishers to be relevant to the search or information which the customer is seeking when he/she is online. So, content curation and aggregation is a job unique to this industry. Besides, typically, there are job profiles of content managers, editors and visualizers. There are posts of community managers also which, although not unique, play a very important role in the e-commerce space.”
To conclude, the Indian ecommerce industry is expected to see a tremendous growth. Issues such as parking problem, lack of choice and limited time are all possible dampeners of offline shopping experience which are inclining people towards online
