What do Indians buy online?

Recently I wrote an answer on Quora about the overview of Indian e-commerce Industry. I think it might be nice to compile it into an article here on medium. The question I intend to answer is … What do we Indians buy online?
I am a part of an an amazing online brand called Miracas.com. Our aim is to bring international fashion to fellow Indians. It is an exciting time to be in ecommerce space in India, given the growth potential as well as the challenges involved in it.
According to 2016 numbers, e-com in India is about a 15bn industry. The landscape is dominated by travel and ticketing. This category amounts to about 63% of the market in terms of transaction value. Domestic and international travel, including train bookings makes up for most of it. Hotel booking is another growing component in this category.

The second biggest category is of course e-retail. To a layman, this category basically represents e-commerce, and for good reasons. The potential, the challenges and the glamour is all here.
E-retail is the largest non travel category in e-commerce. More than 30% of e-commerce in India is due to e-retail. Let’s break it up and see what do people buy in this category. When talking about e-commerce, it is customary to talk in terms of GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) . However in order to answer the question we started with, it probably makes more sense to talk in terms of number of transactions.
E-retail has three major components: Books, Electronics and Fashion. Here is an approximate breakup in terms of number of transactions in each category.

Lets first analyse the “Others” category in the above chart. Major component in this category are: Baby care, home decor and personal care. Interestingly this is in stark contrast with global e-commerce numbers where these categories make up for a larger percentage.
This category constitute to about 21% of total transactions. Books is also the category that practically invented e-commerce. Though in terms of GMV (Gross merchandise volume), books account for a considerably smaller number.
This is the most important category out of these four. It accounts to more than 50% of GMV. In terms of number of transactions it accounts to about 20% of the sales.
If we look at the finer categories in electronics, about half of all transactions in electronic products come from Computer, Camera and related accessories.
The bigger chunk in electronic sales however comes from… you guessed it… Mobile phones and accessories. Mobile phones constitute to just about 10% of entire e-tail sales, though in terms of GMV that percentage is a whopping 35%. That’s the reason why the big players are so interested in selling you the mobile phones with attractive offers and interest free EMIs.
Finally let’s zoom into Fashion. India’s favorite e-retail category. About 35% of all e-retail transactions come from Fashion products. Here is a chart to visualize it graphically.

more than 50% of all sales in online fashion is just apparels, followed by Footwear and Handbags. Together these three categories constitute to about 90% of online fashion market. The remaining 10% includes jewelry and other items.
Over the past three decades, Indian buyers have outgrown the initial euphoria of a being a global market into buyers who wants more. More variety, more options, more brands, most styles. Our sense of fashion has grown from classic to modern and now to international. Charting these trends will make for an interesting article. Though may be I should spill it over to a separate one.
There is a rising demand for international fashion in india. At miracas.com we work relentlessly to fill this space with the most beautiful of the international apparels carefully curated for Indian taste. We bring to India apparels made with variety of fabric like mercerised cotton and Milk silk not easily available otherwise.
The gap is large, and so it the opportunity. And we are poised to take it head on.
Please feel free to contact me at rahul@miracas if I can help you regarding this article or in any other way. If you feel the article was useful to you, do give it a thumbs up :)
Originally published at medium.com on July 30, 2017.
The author is the CEO at Miracas.com, an online fast fashion brand based out of Pune, India. Please feel free to reach out to him at rahul@miracas.com

