The Covid-19 pandemic that broke out in early 2020 has managed to change online shopping trends, including in India. While many businesses or businesses initially struggled to go offline to online, almost most businesses end up selling online.
In fact, the results of the BPS survey showed that as many as 31% of respondents felt an increase in online shopping during the pandemic. While 28% of respondents experienced a decline in online shopping activity and the rest remained.
Observing shopping trends during a pandemic reminds us of a long history of online shopping trends in India. Before e-commerce came along, shoppers could only shop through forums or social media.
What Do You Think About Online Shopping in India?
We’ve summarized it for you below.
In any buying and selling forum, buyers can search for interesting items using the Katkus search bar. Later, the seller will provide a mobile number or email address so that they can discuss the product in more detail. The transaction then continued via SMS and not via the forum. After the payment made, the seller will send the goods to the buyer.
This method is quite simple as there is no need for a third party to “witness” the sale and purchase. However, there are also many cases where the seller defrauds the buyer by either not shipping the goods, shipping goods that are no longer good, or shipping the wrong product. However, you can still use message boards like Katkus that only focus on buying and selling connections between sellers. For example, the Lazada seller community discussion forum, which brings together many other sellers to discuss and ask questions about buying and selling online.
Switch To Social Media
The advent of Facebook in the mid-2000s successfully changed India online shopping trend, which was initially done through buying and selling forums, with many people using social media in the mid-2000s. People, especially women, use social media to sell and buy all kinds of fashionable skin care products.
As with buying and selling forums, buyers provide cell phone numbers that sellers and buyers will later trade directly via SMS or private messages on social media. After making the payment, the buyer will send the goods purchased by the seller.
In the same system, the level of security between buying and selling forums and social media is quite low as they do not prioritize buyers. In the event of fraud, both on the forums and on social media, no one can held responsible
The Emergence of E-Commerce In India
Although e-commerce has used overseas for a long time, in India itself, e-commerce was only widely used after 2010. Even then, the features and completeness of e-commerce merchandise are still far from perfect. However, since the advent of e-commerce, transaction security is valued much higher as buyers also have the right to criticize sellers if something goes wrong.
There has been a significant increase in e-commerce, even initially e-commerce only had a website and no mobile applications. In early 2010, the Internet in India was not as readily available as it is today and its appearance still limited, which is why many e-commerce sites only had websites. While it attracted a lot of people, e-commerce at that time was not as popular as it was not able to reach a lot of people. Although the internet is easily accessible through cell phones, e-commerce widely used by the public.
E-Commerce In India
e-commerce is also improving; starting with the features offered, product completeness and delivery. Not only serving buyers, now several e-commerce companies also provide seller support services. One of the e-commerce sites that always helps sellers is Lazada, which has an incubation feature where the Lazada team will help new sellers to sell.
With this feature, new sellers will learn different things for 3 months; from learning how to ship products to increasing your sales. In addition, Lazada also provides a new product promotion feature, thanks has a “View Now Buy Now” feature that allows viewers to shop by clicking on the product banner during a live stream. Not all sellers can live stream easily, so the Lazada team helps these sellers learn about the live broadcast feature.
Here is a brief history of online shopping trends in India. After going through a period where there have many fraud cases, now people don’t need to worry as there e-commerce sites that watched by third parties.
