Hurdles of online shopping in India – Buyers perspective

Online shopping in India is at a very nascent stage, with not many users actually trying it out. In a country of more than a billion, less than 10% of the population gets online, of which a fraction do shopping online. Why is this the case and what needs to be changed, this article tries to brush upon few of these issues and how they can be solved

Online shopping across the globe is done for mainly one reason that is convenience as for many of them; things are not available near to where they stay. But in India that’s not the case, as for most of us getting things is just round the corner. So what are the reasons why Indians would shop online, currently its only price advantage. This is mainly provided by giving them Deals or Coupons to reduce the prices then the offline market.

Even after doing that consumers are not willing to shop online, what does then stop them?

• Lack of trust in the online channel
• Non availability of credit card
• Lack of awareness

These are just some of the reasons, and this can be easily be addressed by online merchants. The first two points can be solved with one simple solution is buy providing cash on delivery, by doing this the merchants can achieve to things, one they can reach a wider population tapping into non credit card/debit card owning population. Second it can also give ease and comfort for the buyers, as they have the surety of seeing the goods before making the purchase.

The other element is lack of awareness amongst the buyers, where to find the best deal or which store to buy from and where not. Merchants also release coupons in the market to attract customers, but how do buyers get that.

For this there are sites like Dealdunia, which aggregates deals and coupons from all the sites like flipkart, ebay, homeshop18, Jabong, Zovi, Myntra and many more. They categorize these deals in different categories such as Electronics, Mobile, Fashion, Home appliance etc. and all of this is free, buyer has to pay nothing for these coupons or deals. They just acts as a platform for providing the information the merchants want to pass to the prospective buyers