Growth in e-commerce shoppers

125% growth in e-commerce shoppers: ViziSense
ViziSense, a leading online audience and ad measurement platform, has released an extensive and comprehensive report on the fast growing B2C e-commerce segment. This report shares interesting insights about the rapidly evolving B2C e-commerce market (non-travel). While the online audience grew by 40 per cent between July 2010 and June 2011, e-commerce (non-travel) grew three times of that. The report also showcases the meteoric growth of the services category (group-buying and daily deal sites as well as ticketing sites), which has created plenty of first-time online shoppers and kept them online, hungry for more deals
This report is an outcome of analyzing e-commerce usage and trends witnessed within their 130,000 panel of online users. The transaction trends have been derived from observing the behaviour of a 5,000 sub-group of e-commerce shoppers and the feedback around experience and purchase intent has been captured through exclusive online surveys with over 1,600 of their panelists. The report also captures a summary and sound-bytes from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Mouthshut for some of the leading brands within this space.
Commenting on the report, Amit Bhartiya, GM, ViziSense, said, “The huge buzz seen in the e-commerce category funding and valuations last year has been matched by real and continued growth within this category. New formats and innovation like cash on delivery and free shipping have broken the barriers for Indians to come out and embrace e-commerce in large numbers and a combination of great deals and convenience will lead the charge for this category going forward. We are also amazed to see the huge traction that recently launched sites like Flipkart, Fashionandyou, Snapdeal and Bookmyshow have gained.”
The report further divides the e-commerce category into websites that sell products and those selling services, although these lines are now starting to get blurred, with services websites showing clear signs of adding products to their bundle of deals. Traditional shopping cart formats form part of the product category of sites (eBay, Amazon, Flipkart, Homeshop18, etc.) and these have been prevalent in the Indian market for the last 10 years (grew 20 per cent in the last six months). Services, largely comprising the extremely popular group-buying formats, have got incubated and grown massively within the last 12 months.
Services have seen larger contribution to the growth of e-commerce shoppers (almost 70 per cent growth in the last six months).
• Homeshop18 now ranks amongst the Top 3 within the shopping cart sites (by audience and share of transactions)
• Effective use of direct mailers and online display advertising have created more shoppers than Search advertising
• Snapdeal is the clear leader in group-buying/daily deal sites; commands at least 80 per cent of shoppers within the category
• Private shopping clubs like Fashionandyou now comprise almost 50 per cent of the shoppers on product sites
• Bookmyshow is the undisputed leader within ticketing sites; its audience is three times the size of its competitors