India being a diverse country, displays a wide scale of features, where the single common need of 1.2 Bn (World Bank: Census 2011) India’s population can be consumption/goods; the country offers a strong market grounds for any producer or a manufacturer. What we have seen in past 3-4 years is a brisk risk of a market facilitator for any producer-consumer market i.e. ecommerce, more specifically Online Retail.

Recently Forrester published a new report on ‘The Evolution of Global ecommerce Markets’, which highlighted how global ecommerce markets are evolving, analyzing how markets are shifting from an early stage to the one in which consumers spend lavishly online and buy across a wide variety of categories. It was noted that markets tend to go through framework of four phases as they reach the stage of well-developed ecommerce market. Those four phases can be identified as following:

Phase 1: Connecting and Entertaining
Phase 2: eBusiness Basics
Phase 3: Comparable Goods Purchases
Phase 4: Subjective Goods Purchases

In India according to IAMAI about 150 million people are ready to get onto the e-commerce way of shopping based on parameters like income, education and occupation of households but still the number of people transacting online in India were less than 10 million in 2011 (Source: Avendus).

Some features of etail which are attracting consumers to buy online in India are availability of product, competitive price/discounts, and convenience but Ecommerce in India has still a long way to go and can be viewed as process of natural evolution in total, where multiple factors are favoring it slowly and steadily for a high potential consumer industry in future but don’t miss out the challenges which are also many.