eBay, Myntra, Snapdeal, Amazone , & Filpkart how to win e-commerce

For eBay, Myntra, Snapdeal, Amazone , & Filpkart how to win e-commerce battle in India

Snapdeal, Myntra and eBay saw daily sales increase three to four times on GOSF...

With the growth of online websites both international and local, we are increasingly noticing that the Internet-savvy Indian customer is ready to shop online for everything from groceries to jewellery and beyond. The increasing broadband penetration and the flood of e-commerce companies have helped carve a ripe industry, providing opportunities and flexibility to consumers and businesses alike. To put things in context, Google online shopping festival, popularly known as GOSF, attracted two million unique visitors in 2013. That’s twice the number of users who engaged in the three day long online shopping festival a year before.

According to Google, of the e-commerce websites that partnered for the event, over 200 organisations including the likes of Snapdeal, Myntra and eBay saw daily sales increase three to four times; it wasn’t just electronics and shoes that shoppers lined up for. Categories as diverse as housing also benefited with Tata Housing closing bookings of over 55 apartments!

The success of such endeavours has only spurred the Indian e-commerce industry to invest more heavily into advertising, promotions and online festivals and the current holiday season promises to be witness to the largest online shopping frenzy in India. Online retailers, just like their brick and mortar counterparts, recognise the value of capitalising on this seasonal rush and need to be prepared to maximise their sales. Let’s dig a little deeper into some of the challenges that online retailers face when it comes to this surge and how these need to be tackled for them to have a successful season.

Performance

When shoppers transact online, they give up on the experience that a brick and mortar store provides, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be a disadvantage. There are ways by which online retailers can provide a fulfilling experience that will have shoppers coming back for more. Catalogue and ease of navigation are the obvious ones; but performance is the critical pillar without which even the most obvious parameters can fail to bring success. Overall website performance—the speed at which a webpage, along with images and other product information details loads on different devices is mission critical. Aberdeen Group found that every one-second delay in page load time equals 11% decrease in the number of page views or seven percent decrease in conversions.

Mobile

It is critical to note that e-commerce is not the only revolution taking place in the subcontinent. Mobile and in particular, affordable smartphones along with cheap data plans