Following our post last week on online coupon portal Cuponation’s global survey on e-commerce and online retail, we have a guest post from Upasna Kakroo, in the Online Marketing department at Cuponation, presenting a more detailed analysis of the study’s findings.
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It has been interesting to read comments from the industry describing how e-commerce sites in India have been primarily focused on men with the underlying thought that women do not shop independently – at least online. This is now being challenged considerably with women specific product categories like lingerie showing a surge in online sales. Of course one could argue that it is men who buy those products as well, but several concurrent studies in recent months including the ‘Women on web’ study by Google affirm the thought that Indian women have indeed taken their shopping bags online.
While the convenience and the private space offered by the online medium alongside increased device/ Internet penetration is driving interest and sales, issues like lack of trust, disaggregated information- sometimes even noise, inability to be able to ‘bargain’ still loom large. At CupoNation, we look at these issues as opportunities that we are trying to find creative solutions to. To this end, we undertook a survey in June this year to understand user behaviour. Our results concurred with the other studies showing that over 73% Indian women are shopping online at least 1-5 times a month. The age group over 36 years represents only about 11% showing that online shopping is mainly driven by younger Indian women.
Fashion is the single biggest category and many key Indian retailers stand out as the favourite online shopping destinations for Indian women. While Flipkart may not be associated with ‘pure fashion’ the top of mind recall for it is evidently high.
We have been trying to integrate the offline ‘bargaining’ experiences online. We see results of this behaviour/ need too, as we see a high percentage of women been drawn to ‘coupons’ online with over 80% women finding coupons mainly using search engines (like Google) for discovery. While other studies indicate women are recommending products to friends and family quite aggressively, it does seem that they still rely on ‘Google’ to find what suits them the best.
CupoNation’s vision of the Indian female user is the ‘independent, liberal’ woman who makes her own choices and proactively engages in final decision making keeping herself regularly informed of the options and tools she needs. Our campaigns for instance the Flexidom- female condom campaign has also been focused on the proactive independent Indian women, who are stepping up to make their own decisions.
Initial responses convince us that early financial independence, the desire to assert and express their individuality, will driver further Indian women to the forefront of the ever growing sphere of online deals and shopping. Firms are likely to see bottom-up innovation from these users, and will need to reciprocate and meet the needs in-order to stay competitive. At CupoNation, we believe this can perhaps also mean an increase in co-creation, flexibility and new ways of integrating online and offline experiences. As we try our best to stay creative- keep an eye out for this space!
For additional data and information, have a look at the SlideShare presentation:
