Solving the challenges faced by eCommerce businesses in India

Birendra Kumar
Code Master
Published in
3 min readFeb 10, 2020

Indian e-commerce companies are expanding and flourishing in the country at a rapid rate. According to a report, the Indian e-commerce market in two decade’s time will overtake the US as the second largest e-commerce market in the world. With the inclusion of smartphones and the internet in our daily lives, this has become an indispensable medium in the e-world.

The e-commerce domain definitely promises to get bigger and better with time and a revolution in the definition of consumer and seller relationship is evident. Though the system is very beneficial yet there are certain drawbacks faced by the Indian e-commerce industries. In this article, we will provide a detailed description of the drawbacks.

Personalization is a major problem in the country, with more than 70% of the total sales come from tabs and mobiles. The page used by the e-commerce websites must also be responsive and user-friendly, to attract more customers.

One of the most common instances is when a customer buys a product from a specific company for the first time, the buyer may not have any prior knowledge about the company or even the product. More than 50% of the people in the nation want to have personal support before and after the purchase of the product. This is an arduous process and often disturbing for the seller.

The mode of payment usually preferred by the Indian buyers is Cash On Delivery. People are still concerned about paying the money online. Online transactions via the gateways are often a failure and people do not usually trust them. It is a gruesome procedure for the companies to collect the cash manually as it is risky, an onus and also an expensive process.

With the advancement in technology, smartphones are very common in India.

Access to every corner of India is not available due to transportation barriers. Certain pin-codes are not available in the shipping address list and it becomes an indeed tedious task by the companies to reach to every citizen of the country.

COD being the preferred mode it adds further obligation. As many as 80% orders of 2015 of Flipkart was placed with cash on delivery options, in which the small towns had a lead with 90% COD orders.

Language becomes a barrier to where people only can communicate in English for making a purchase online. The e-commerce companies lose potential regional buyers due to this issue as well. Placing false orders is an issue too nowadays, where people end up canceling or not receiving the order that they had ordered. The companies undergo a huge loss as they process the order and cater it to their customers only to find the product getting returned!

As an eCommerce seller, you have to align strategies to counter these issues if you are selling to Indian buyers. You need a good IT vendor who provides a very good eCommerce website design service, and also mobile application development. After the IT part is done, you have to handle business processes like COD, returns, business margins, etc. When this is done, the majority of the operations will go smoothly.

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