Who Buys What Online?

Indian e-commerce is exciting, growing and extremely layered -- when you look deep into the data, that is. According to estimates, Indian e-commerce will reach US$112 Billion in GMV by FY25, growing at a 29% CAGR over FY20-25E, with grocery and fashion/apparel likely to be the key drivers of incremental growth.

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When we unpeel layers on insights with our data (well over 1 Million Transactions from April to Sept 2021), we see that volume (number of orders) and value (gross merchandise value) contribution of categories by tiers are starkly different. Clear difference and interesting interplay is the difference in order volume of Fashion vs Grocery in Tier1 vs Tier3. This is largely due to differing interests of consumer types and their needs which the large marketplaces are addressing. Here, let's look closer:

Convenience seeking Tier1 consumers order more Grocery items, while aspirational Tier3 users order more Fashion for the latest trends and styles. Also confirming this bias is the higher order volume contribution of Mobile and Personal Care in Tier3. New and fast growing platforms like Meesho and Purplle are also targeting Tier3 users.  

Lower Tiers are now the new battlegrounds for Indian e-Commerce space. With Top marketplaces like Flipkart also building new products (Shopsy) to capture this market. In our next piece we will explore value contributions across Tiers for different categories.

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‍Vumonic Datalabs is a global consumer intelligence platform. We provide high quality, deterministically linked, large structured data that can be used to derive deep consumer,  business and market insights. Our proprietary data pipelines deliver unbiased actual transaction data collected in a privacy secure manner via large global panels.