Challenges and growth of E-commerce in India

Abstract

E-commerce came to India in 1999 with Fabmart.com selling books online. It was soon followed by the likes of rediff.com and Indiatimes shopping which also began selling a variety of other product categories in addition to books. The first success of e-commerce in India was MakeMyTrip in airline ticketing. This was soon followed by many players flocking to the sector selling ticketing and travelling services. One company took this business logic further to provide ticketing services for buses in India and in the process brought some sort of consolidation to an extremely fragmented industry. This company was Redbus. However, e-commerce in product categories never really took off in India till the year 2007 when Flipkart entered the industry and redefined the sector entirely. It has been shown in literature that the success of e-commerce requires both familiarity as well as trust. This familiarity and trust takes time to build. But within a short span of 3 years, Flipkart became the largest online retailer in India shipping 7000 – 8000 products every day. Today, Flipkart is closely followed by Infibeam, which also started operations in 2007 and is a major online retailer for all kinds of product categories – from books to automobiles! Apart from these general players, India has also witnessed the emergence of focused retailers like Myntra which exclusively sells branded apparel online.