Indian ecommerce industry to post 35% growth: Study

NEW DELHI: India's e-commerce industry is likely to clock a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35% and cross the$100-billion mark over the next five years, from $17 billion at present, according to an Assocham-Pricewaterhouse Coopers study.

Riding on the strong growth momentum of 2015, the e-commerce sector is estimated to see a 72% jump in the average annual spend on online purchases per individual in 2016, from the current level of 65%, the study said.

In contrast, shopping malls are suffering from lesser footfalls leading to around 25% vacancy rate, along with a 30% drop in rentals in the last one year, according to the study.

It observed that the trend in Indian malls is in line with the declining number of footfalls in retail space in over 200 shopping malls across the US, the UK and other countries.

In the US, malls are facing a 46% vacancy rate whereas it stands at 32% in the UK, it said.
"Online shopping has shown a handsome growth while brick-and-mortar malls are witnessing a slowdown. The growth in e-commerce looks impressive because of a low base and rising penetration of the Internet," Assocham Secretary General D S Rawat said.

Besides, with improvement in infrastructure such as logistics, broadband and Internet-ready devices, there is likely to be a significant increase in the number of consumers making purchases online, the study said, predicting around 65 million consumers in India to buy online in 2015, as against around 40 million in 2014.

Some 45% of malls in India are expected to be converted into non-retail space in the next 15 years, which would be replaced with movie theatres, restaurants, discount retailers and the like, the study projected.

5 factors that will drive e-commerce growth

Online retail has not only captured a large share of the mind space but is increasing market share rapidly

From relative obscurity to a potential game changer in a matter of just few years, online retail has not only captured a larger share of mind space; it has been grabbing market share rapidly. Flipkart, one of the largest online retailers in India, grew five times in volume of products sold between 2013 and 2014. Snapdeal, another large player, is reported to have grown six times in the same period. Is this growth rate sustainable? Here are five factors that will help online retail grow in coming years.

Localisation of Internet content

Google India spokesperson says that web content search in Hindi has grown a whopping 155 per cent in the past year, which is significantly higher than the growth of content search in English. Hindi content searched through mobile Internet grew at even higher rate of 300 per cent in the same period. Growth in traffic in other languages, too, was impressive.

Sensing an opportunity, Snapdeal launched its interfaces in local languages. “We launched Snapdeal’s multilingual interface in January 2014 in Hindi and Tamil languages and have seen a tremendous response from customers towards this. We will shortly be adding four more regional language interfaces,” says Ankit Khanna, senior vice-president (product management) at Snapdeal.com.

Online travel firm MakeMyTrip launched its Hindi app in November 2014 and plans to add four more languages — Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam — in the coming months.

With incremental growth in mobile subscriber coming mostly from people who are comfortable with languages other than English, online retailers see this emergent segment as new growth driver. Mohit Bahl of consultancy firm KPMG says localisation of content is a great innovation, which will be helpful in future. For those who have already done it, there will be first mover advantage. Others are likely to follow suit, he adds.

Growth in cities beyond metros

About 20 per cent of India’s population lives in cities outside of metros. There are several pointers that suggest this large group of city dwellers have significant purchasing power. Honda, for instance, sells 60 per cent of its Amaze car in tier-II and tier-III cities. These cities account for 55 per cent of Honda’s City models.

Consumer demand is rising rapidly even in small towns and cities. Talking about the potential of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, a 2012 Nielsen report says: “While metros will remain a staple for marketers and increasing a rural footprint will be critical for volumes in the long run, there is a growth opportunity that is vastly under-rated by many marketers today, which could emerge as a key growth engine for the next 10 years. Middle India, a region made up of approximately 400 towns each with a population of 1-10 lakh, are home to 100 million Indians.” It further says: “These cities are ready to behave like the metros of tomorrow…The annual per capita FMCG consumption of Middle India towns touched Rs  2,800”, which is much higher than the national average of Rs 1,600.

The Nielsen report clearly shows that non-metro cities offer a huge growth potential for many companies. “At Snapdeal.com, we get over 60 per cent of the sales from tier and beyond towns and cities,” says Khanna. Other online retailers have reported the same trend. The contribution of these cities in coming years is set to become even bigger. “In addition to the convenience, another factor that is driving our sales in such cities is that many of the brands do not have footprint in these areas. No physical retailer can have the kind of assortment of products that we have,” observes Praveen Sinha, co-founder of online retailer Jabong.

Growth of mobile commerce

Online retailers’ growing reach in non-metro cities is being driven by the rise in usage of mobile internet in the country. According to Internet and Mobile Association of India, the number of mobile internet users in the country stood at 173 million in December 2014. It is set to grow manifold by 2020. A Confederation of Indian Industry report estimates that in the next six years, the number of people accessing the internet through mobile is set to reach 600 million. “This growth will be spurred by a sharp rise in smartphone adoption, expected to reach 50 per cent penetration by 2020,” says the report. “Given the increased mobile penetration and smartphone adoption in these areas, mobile is certainly one of the major factors driving this trend,” adds Khanna of Snapdeal.com

Growing usage of debit cards for cashless transaction

There has been a net addition of nearly 140 million debit cards in the country in the past two years. What is more, the usage of debit cards at point of sale terminals has seen a growth of 86 per cent in the same period. It indicates the willingness to use debit cards for purposes other than withdrawing money at ATMs has increased. With many online retailers still insisting on use of cards for high value transactions, it is a welcome change. It will allow e-tailers to reach out to many areas and many more customers in coming years.

Currently, cash on delivery constitutes nearly 70 per cent of all transactions for online retailers. But online retailers say the usage of cards for online transactions is steadily rising.

Growing investment in logistics and warehouses

Online retailers say they have extended their reach to “12,500-15,000 pin codes” out of nearly 100,000 pin codes in the country. There are also reports of online retailers trying to tie up with India Post and petrol pump stations to reach out to more customers. Expected aviation boom in small cities might also widen the reach of online retailers in future.

With estimated investment of nearly $2 billion in logistics and warehouses by 2020, the reach of online retailers to deliver their products in remote locations is set to increase. “There are many companies set to invest in specialised logistic services with a view to facilitating delivery of online retailers in coming years,” observes Bahl of KPMG.

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5 things you didn't know about India's e-commerce industry

The Singles' Day sale was originally named because the date Nov. 11 has four singles (11/11)—was started as a joke between university students, but Alibaba.com later converted it as a day when singles can shop.

 

Late on Tuesday, Alibaba came close to generating double digit sales on Singles Day, clocking an impressive $9 billion (Rs 55,000 crore), and beating its own record of $5.9 billion last year. 

 

But to really put those numbers in context, consider this: India’s entire e-commerce industry was worth only $11 billion in 2013. Of this, a mere $2 billion was from sales of physical goods, whereas most of Alibaba’s $9 billion in sales came from actual goods rather than services.

 

In a report on e-commerce, however, broking firm Motilal Oswal says that this is just the start of a multi-year growth for the e-commerce sector in India. Indian retailers, therefore, do not have to be too concerned as despite strong growth in USA and China, e-tailing is still only 5-6% of total retail sales there.

 

Here are five interesting insights from the report.

 

1. India is almost 10 years behind China in the e-commerce space. China’s inflection point was reached in 2005 when its size was similar to India’s current market size. Thankfully for India the dynamics currently are similar to what existed in China then – growing broadband penetration, acceptance of online marketplaces, and lack of physical retail infrastructure in many places.

 

2. Forget the Flipkarts, Snapdeals and Amazons. Travel is where the real money in India’s e-commerce is. Online travel accounts for nearly 71% of e-commerce business in India. This business has grown at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32% over 2009-13. E-tailing, on the other hand, accounts for only 8.7% of organised retail and a minuscule 0.3% of total retail sales. Even within sales of physical goods, books are a mere 7% of total book sales, mobile phones are 2% of all handsets sold, and fashion goods sold online are just 1%. Online jewellery sales account for only 0.2 per cent of all jewellery sold. Motilal Oswal, however, expects e-tailing to pick up with a focus on fashion.

 

3. Alibaba is an outlier when it comes to margins and making money in the e-commerce ecosystem. The Chinese company makes an operating profit of 40% compared to industry standard (US and China) of 8-10%. Travel sites typically make 2.3%. Amazon, the industry pioneer, is yet to achieve healthy profitability even after two decades of dominance. Indian players, the report points out, are not even thinking of profitability yet. It’s a game of market share and market penetration, causing all serious players to have a war chest ready for when the industry scales multiple times.

 

4. For every Rs 100 spent on e-tailing, Rs 35 is spent on supporting services like warehousing, payment gateways, and logistics, among others. Delivery costs a platform owner 8-10% implying significant burn. Though 50-60% of delivery logistics today are handled by large e-tailers themselves, this proportion may reduce going forward as the participation of lower tier cities picks up. Presently, aggressive pricing in India is leading to e-tailers making losses on every segment. For a Rs 100 sale of a book, the e-tailer incurs a loss of Rs 24, a loss of Rs 13 in mobiles, and Rs 8 in apparel. 

How has e-commerce changed the global market

The rise and rise of E-commerce has radically transformed the way the world does business at every imaginable level—from the smallest of small businesses taking its first hesitant step into the online marketplace to the cut and thrust of global competition, where the biggest online players vie to dominate the market.

The increasing importance of the global market is driven in part by the ubiquity of smartphones and other mobile devices as well as the ever-growing availability of Wi-Fi access, not only within the home, but also in public areas, such as cafes, shopping malls and bricks and mortar stores. These factors have come together to create an environment which facilitates online purchases at almost any time and in practically any location. The online businesses which have benefited most from this environment are, not surprisingly, those who have invested in an online presence which has been optimized for mobile customers. With providers such as Livecity offering simple to use website building tools with drag and drop interfaces that can be used to create both traditional and mobile-optimized sites, this option is increasingly available to even the smallest businesses.

As the online market continues to expand, evolve and mature, it looks set to continue to change the global market for many years into the future. While all this change has brought with it many new opportunities for businesses to reach out to new clients and customers as well as to partner with one another it has also uncovered new challenges which the business community will have to address. These include ensuring safe payments with innovative payment solutions such as that developed by PayPal, as well as creating attractive online stores and an integrated shopping experience for their customers.

So what is on the horizon for the global e-commerce? Today, retailers and other businesses of every type and size can glean indications of where the global market is headed by looking at the ways in which some of the big name players, such as Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Google are developing and the kinds of research and technology those companies are investing in. This is not to forget, of course, the importance of China's online marketplace, which, with heavy hitters such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, looks increasingly set to take its place at the forefront of the global economy. These businesses, too, are important indicators of the ways in which the worldwide online market is developing.

There is much that smaller businesses can learn from the strategies currently being implemented by all these big players. It is telling, for example, that world class E-commerce strategies include considerable investment in groundbreaking payment technologies which are geared to counteract the risk of fraud. Security risks of all kinds continue to be a threat which online businesses of all sizes must be vigilant about because, while secure payment systems become ever more sophisticated, so do the methods of fraudsters and other criminals who would seek to undermine those systems. The big online businesses also continue the quest to enhance the customer's experience of shopping in their Online Store by putting time and money into the development of next generation search technologies.

Ecommerce Tips & Techniques Overview As the ecommerce industry has grown, so have the techniques used by successful online stores to attract potential shoppers and convert them to buyers. NCR Retail Online (NRO) makes it easy for you to create a highly successful online business. This guide will give you the knowledge that you need to maximize your store's success: Search Engine Optimization: Drive potential customers to your website Site Usability: Make it easy for customers to find the products they're looking for Great Content: Give customers the information that they need to make their purchasing decisions Search Engine Optimization Search engines play an important role in the success of an online business. Take a look at the results of one study that analyzes how consumers find products on the internet [Source: Overture]: Of those shoppers using search engines, most will explore only the first few pages of search results. In fact, 87% of all traffic goes to the websites listed within the top 20 results for any search. To increase your chances of being highly ranked by today's most popular search engines, design and configure your store to be "search engine friendly” and plan to invest some of your marketing budget in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Site Usability The Web is all about providing people with access to information. Website usability is all about helping people find the relevant information as quickly and as easily as possible. You should utilize proven techniques when configuring your home page and category structure to maximize your ability to sell. Great Content Shoppers want to know that you are an expert on your products and that you are a trustworthy seller. Populating your online store with high-quality product images and descriptions can make a big difference in whether shoppers purchase items from you or from someone else. Use plenty of informational content on your Extra Pages to educate shoppers and turn them into buyers.   Tips & Techniques Search engine Friendly Design Your "search engine friendly” store will make it easy for search engines to understand what you have to offer and present it to searching buyers. Select Your Money Making Keywords Internet shoppers find the products that they're searching for by typing keywords or search phases into popular search engines. It is very important to choose keywords that will point shoppers directly to your store. Make a list of every keyword that you can imagine a shopper might use to find your online store. Ask yourself, "What are people typing into search engines to find the products that I am selling?” Choose your target keywords from this list by determining: How popular is the phrase and how many times was it searched for in the last 90 days? How competitive is the phrase and are there many companies targeting the keyword? Is the keyword relevant to my business and specific enough to capture potential buyers of my products? You can find more information to help you select your keywords at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and http://www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ Put Your Keywords to Work on Your Website Once you have identified your targeted list of keywords, you need to put them to work on your website so that search engines will find your products. Keyword-Rich Domain Names If you suspect that most of your store traffic will be generated by search engines, it helps to have a keyword-rich domain name. Registering more than one domain name will help boost your search engine rankings and prevent your competitors from securing them for their benefit. Some examples of keyword-rich domain names are: http://www.hanksfishandtackle.com/ http://www.atlantafurniture.com/ Keyword Rich Page Content Strategic use of your target keywords throughout your website helps search engines understand what your website has to sell. Use your keywords as much as possible within your website content, but make sure that it is still pleasant for your customer to read. Include keywords in each of the following areas of your website: Title Tags: One sentence using as many target keywords as possible. Keep this to 60 characters or less. Meta Descriptions: Two to three sentences totaling 255 characters or less. Load meta descriptions with keywords and make sure the descriptions are pleasant to read. Home Page: Two to three paragraphs about your store. Again, load with keywords, but keep it readable. Categories: Use keywords in category names. Limit subcategories to two to three layers deep. Page content: Load page content and item descriptions with keywords. Focus on only two to three keywords per page. Extra Pages: Create valuable, informational content on Extra Pages to increase the total keyword count on your website. For example, if you sell specialty foods, add Extra Pages for recipes or nutritional information. Search engine optimization Many tools and techniques are available to further maximize your rankings with popular search engines. Techniques include: Keyword Research and Selection: Your most profitable keywords are identified by reviewing your online product offerings; analyzing your competitors' websites; and conducting targeted product research, search trend analysis and keyword comparisons. Content Optimization: Strategically apply target keywords to your website content. Meta InformationOptimization: Optimize your website's page titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords to make the best use of your selected keywords. Site Map Creation and Submission: Create a site map of your online store and submit it to popular online search engines. A well-planned site map gives search engines a clear picture of your entire website. Directory Submissions: Even more valuable than your content are the links that point from valuable Internet directories to your website. Identify high-value directories and submit your website content. Reciprocal Link Submissions: Reciprocal links are also more valuable to search engines than your site content. Identify related websites and negotiate reciprocal linking arrangements. Newsletters and Press Releases: These communication mechanisms can generate valuable back-links to your site. Site Usability Overall Site Design The easier your site is to use, the more satisfied customers you'll have. NRO includes features to make your site easy for shoppers to find and buy your products. When you create the header area for your site, be sure to use your logo as a link back to your home page. Make checkout as painless as possible by enabling Quick Checkout. With Quick Checkout, shoppers can complete the entire checkout process on one easy-to-use page without having to create an account. The quicker the checkout process, the fewer abandoned carts you'll have. Make it easy for shoppers to get in touch with you. Add your phone number, email address, and physical address to your page footer. Also, add an Extra Page for ‘Store Hours and Directions' that includes a Google Map of all your locations. Remember that your ecommerce store is also a window into your brick and mortar store! Home Page Your home page impacts how customers view you and your products. It is the shop window, billboard, welcome greeting, and store map all on one page. A quality home page will grab shoppers' attention and stimulate purchasing decisions. Make it clear that shoppers can buy online through your site. Create an online ‘window display.' Showcase new items as well as a variety of your best products. Highlight current sales and discounts. Minimize distractions that may discourage shoppers from staying on your website. Distractions might include long paragraphs of text, non-product photos, splash pages, animations, and links to other websites. Use Extra Pages, not your home page, for non-shopping related content. Keep graphics to a minimum to avoid losing customers due to slow page loads. Design your home page to fit in a single, non-scrolling window. Categories Online sales frequently fail because shoppers cannot find the products that they want to buy. Think about departments in your store and take time to create category names that are meaningful to shoppers. Use natural language in category names. Incorporate your target keywords into your category names. Resist using UPPER CASE letters and symbols such as &. To facilitate organic search engine optimization (SEO), name your product categories and sub-categories using high-volume, multi-keyword search phrases. Use no more than two or three levels of subcategories. Add items to multiple categories to make them easier to find. Consider adding "Shop By Brand,” "Shop By Price,” or "Shop By Season” categories to give your shoppers more than one way to find an item in your store. Use an intuitive category structure that gives shoppers multiple ways to find items in your store, for example: Categories > Sports Equipment Nike Pro Tour Golf Bag Men's X8 Snowboard > Sports Apparel Youth Baseball Jersey Shop by Brand > Nike Nike Pro Tour Golf Bag > Rawlings Youth Baseball Jersey > Burton Men's X8 Snowboard Shop by Season > Summer Sports Nike Pro Tour Golf Bag Youth Baseball Jersey > Winter Sports Men's X8 Snowboard    Great Content Give shoppers all the information that they need in order to make purchasing decisions. Imagine that the shopper is in your store to inquire about the product. What do they ask? What do they want to see? If they called you on the phone, how would you describe the item? Make sure that you provide a description and good, web-optimized images for every item for sale on your website. Missing content can make your business appear unprofessional and may cause shoppers to look elsewhere. Plan to launch your site with a small subset of your items. Expand your product offerings as you continue to develop your valuable item content. Clear Detailed Images Shoppers want to see what they are buying. Make sure that every item has an image that displays clearly. Images should be saved at 72 dpi to provide shoppers with fast page loads and the highest resolution viewable on the web. Keep regular item images to dimensions of 300 x 300 pixels or smaller. Alternately, you can upload large image dimensions to give customers a "zoom" like experience to allow them to see details in your products. Shoppers respond well to seeing items "in context” ( e.g., clothing on a model or furniture in a room). On your item detail page, consider adding multiple item images to give shoppers an idea of how an item looks by itself, in context, and from various angles. File size per image should be no more than 20KB to allow pages to load quickly and minimize your bandwidth costs. To ensure that your online store is visually pleasing; size all thumbnails into a square shape with the same dimensions. We recommend 100 x 100 pixels. Category and Item Descriptions Contact your vendors to obtain images. If you plan to leverage product descriptions from your vendors, they should be edited to suit your business and target audience. If identical product descriptions are used on many websites, search engines will only display one site in their search results. Reword item descriptions from your vendors to make them unique to your store. Keep your text formatting simple and easy to read. Answer any questions that a buyer will have about a product. Showcase your expertise to help sell the product. Keep in mind that customers are at a "sensory disadvantage” when they are shopping online since they can only use their sense of sight to evaluate a product. A well-written product description creates a tangible image in the customer's mind of how a product looks, feels, smells, tastes, etc. Make sure that your item names and descriptions are easy to understand. Your existing Counterpoint item names and descriptions may not be shopper friendly. Use HTML in your descriptions to apply simple formatting. If you have really long descriptions, consider using a two-tiered approach with a bullet summary at the top followed by extensive copy below. Make sure item descriptions use all the keywords that shoppers may use to search for your products (e.g., in addition to the word "coat,” include words such as "outerwear” and "jacket”). Enable product tags and reviews to get your shoppers engaged in reviewing products. Other shoppers experiences with the product can be a great selling point. Add search terms to your site to allow shoppers easier search results to a product. Include common mispellings of words to automatically direct shoppers to what they are really searching for. Set up alternate attributes that are searchable to make it easier for shoppers to drill down into their product search to find what they need quickly. Example of an Optimized Item Description Not Optimized   Optimized

Mind-Blowing, Must-Know Ecommerce Facts

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The ecommerce world is forever changing. Like a steam locomotive, it chugs forwards, blazing down the railway at breakneck speed. Along the way, it delivers factoids and analytics, the breadth of which are sometimes difficult to believe.

If you are a retailer that’s involved in this burgeoning industry, then you already know how exciting it has become. The following list of ecommerce facts will still blow your mind. What follows is some surefire insight that highlights just how big a juggernaut e-tailing has evolved into.

Time is Money

It’s estimated that ecommerce has become such a powerful force that roughly every 30 seconds about $1.5 million dollars is generated. Experts say that about $500,000 of this comes from mobile users, whereas the remaining $1 million is generated from desktop users.

Big players in the game are getting the most bang for the buck, too. Recent ecommerce statistics show that Amazon, by comparison, enjoys about $125,000 of that minute-by-minute revenue. Whereas eBay rakes in about $90,000. By comparison, Apple earns roughly $20,000 per minute in ecommerce.

Ecommerce in Real-Time

The good folks over at Ever Merchant help us better understand how ecommerce works in real-time, and just how much of a revenue generator this industry has become on a global scale. Take a look at this infographic they’ve created for more clarity.

 

Consumers Are Spend-Happy

A recent article by Mashable finds that the average consumer drops about $1,300 per year on ecommerce. And according to consulting firm Booze, Allen and Hamilton, ecommerce is growing like a child, set to eclipse 93% in growth overall this coming year.

One reason why consumers are digging deep into their pockets is due to the convenience of online shopping. One does not have to leave their home, drive anywhere, wait in line or deal with a number of associated inconveniences that are related to brick and mortar shopping.

Rather, one can just get online – via desktop, tablet or mobile device – and shop with ease at their choice of online stores. This is more easily understood by a recent Statistica report that found that over 40% of online users have made purchases from such devices. Furthermore, Statistica says that this has equated to over 1 billion online buyers, a trend they predict will “continuously grow” over the years to come.

Mobile Leads The Way

While desktop shopping has become a mainstay for many, mobile shopping is paving the cement superhighway to the future of online shopping. Google’s recent Mobilegeddon update forces online stores to cater to mobile shoppers with “mobile-friendly” websites, eradicating app-based shopping in favor of a more superfluous and seamless experience from device-to-device.

According to a 2013 report by Statistica, online shopping revenue from mobile devices increased by large margins, growing from just $42 billion in 2013 to over $133 billion in 2014. Namely, the think tank asserts, this was fed by the ease of which shoppers could rely upon secure mobile payment methods. For example, PayPal, the pack leader, processed over $14 billion in payments in 2013 alone.

2015 Healthiest Online Shopping Year Ever

According to a report by E Consultancy, 2015 will be the healthiest online shopping year on record. A look at Britain’s numbers is telling of this. It’s projected that £52.25 billion will be spent online in the UK this year, up 16% from 2014, accounting for over 15% of all retail sales, with the average spender dropping £1,174 online. Germans are predicted to drop £1,023 a person this year while in France the average is projected to be £847.

 

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. still is at the front of the line for most fervent online spenders. According to Internet Retailer, online sales exceeded $300 billion for the first time in 2014, marking over 15% in growth from 2013, with projections for this year pegged at $345 billion or higher.

 

 

 

Statistics and facts about global e-commerce

For private consumers around the globe the most well-known form of e-commerce falls into the business to consumer (B2C) category, also known as online retail or online shopping. It refers to online purchases from bricks-and-mortar retailers, such as Walmart, as well as from “pure-click” online retailing corporations such as Amazon.com or Rakuten. Although it is a growing business around the globe, with some 41 percent of global internet users having purchased products online in 2013, the online shopping penetration rate varies from one country to another; as of 2015, China was the country where most internet users had bought a product online within the previous month. Other countries where online shopping is thriving are Germany, India, Brazil and United Kingdom.

In 2013, global e-retail sales amounted to 839.8 billion U.S. dollars and projections show a growth of up to 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars by 2018. North America is currently the largest regional market for online shopping, with sales worth some 126 billion U.S. dollars reported in 2013, more than double the amount in 2008. The Asia and Oceania region is also becoming a strong contender, especially due to China’s economic boom, with an estimated eight fold increase in sales between 2008 and 2018. The unprecedented worldwide B2C e-commerce sales growth is however expected to slightly slow down in the near future. In 2013, global B2C e-commerce sales grew 19 percent compared to the previous year, but in 2018 forecast expect growth of only 10 percent. In Europe, the United Kingdom is by far the largest market for B2C e-commerce, with a turnover of 107 billion Euros in 2013, twice the amount of the second ranked, France.

In recent years, mobile shopping has been on the rise, with customers increasingly using their mobile devices for various online shopping activities. According to a 2015 study regarding mobile shopping penetration worldwide, 46 percent of internet users in the Asia Pacific region and 20 percent of those in North America had purchased products via a mobile device, whether smartphone or tablet computer. When asked whether mobile phones will become the main tool for purchasing goods in the future, some 9 percent of respondents in an extended global survey strongly agreed. Opinions, however, differed according to region and country, where shoppers Denmark and Belgium rather disagreed, while those in China and India agreed the most. M-commerce sales in India have accounted for 11 percent of total retail sales in 2014 and were expected to grow to 25 percent by 2017, while in China, mobile online retail sales have grown by some 450 percent between 2010 and 2011 and are expected to continue growing in the future, although at much lower rates.

Amazon.com is one of the most popular and well-known example of an online shopping platform. Founded in 1995, the Seattle-based site started out as an online bookstore, but soon began expanding its product range towards other retail goods and consumer electronics. As of 2013, Amazon is the worldwide leading e-retailer, as well as the number one m-retailer globally.

A worldwide study regarding shopping behavior shows that as of 2014, some of the most popular product categories to be shopped online are electronics, fashion and apparel or home appliances. Regional differences are obvious once again, as groceries for example are bought online by 90 percent of Chinese internet users, but only 26 percent of Americans, while sports and outdoor purchases are more popular in Germany than Japan.