E-commerce purchase behavior across different online formats

Abstract

Today, ecommerce is a buzzword throughout India especially among the urban population. E-commerce is slowly changing how business was done throughout India. E-commerce is not something entire new to India. A number of online shopping sites like homeshop18, siffy.com, Ebay, yahoo shopping came into India in the early 2000s to take the advantage of first movers. But they were way ahead of time. In 2000, there were only 10 million internet users in the whole of India. But in the late 2000s, the internet penetration rapidly started increasing laying the foundation for the ecommerce boom that India is currently experiencing. Along with it, the advent of Smartphone also aided the penetration of internet which had led to a situation now, where the there are 600 million mobile only internet users in India. Apart from internet penetration, another reason that is contributing for this boom is the innovative aggregator model where the e-commerce company can just create a platform for the sellers to sell wherein they don't need to do the traditional bear the risk of the product. This model has been innovatively used by even companies like Ola which act as Taxi aggregators. E-commerce has a lot of players, some big and a lot small which can be broadly classified into online shopping and online booking sites. The biggest online shopping players are Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal which is primarily a market place for a wide range of producers from apparel to cell phone, from cosmetics to cutlery. Apart from these, there are a lot of specialty players for food, apparels and other product categories.