In the last few years, India has seen a huge paradigm shift in consumer shopping space. Most of the Indians have now moved over the traditional way of shopping by visiting brick-mortar and picking up items from there and have started shopping online.
Today, you can find almost anything online. Clothing, electronics, furniture in fact everything. Today, there is barely anything that you cannot find online. With over millions of transactions being done every day on these websites, it is very clear that people have moved on from old fashioned method of shopping.
But is this a good shift? Well, certainly not. This rapid growth in online shopping is actually posing a serious threat to the local brick mortar stores around the country. Not just India, but stores around the world are caught up in a mess due to drastic fall in the number of sales. In India, sales have declined by 25-35% in 2014, than in 2013.
India’s Ecommerce is currently worth $20 Billion and it is expected to reach a whopping $70Billion by the end of 2020. This means, most of the revenue would then be coming from e-commerce websites like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon, whereas local stores would hit a bump, with a further fall in their sales.
There is an urgent requirement for all these brick mortar stores to step up and change as per the changing need. The emergence to be online and the need to be omnipresent is the only way forward to the stores in order to survive this stiff competition. With websites like LocalJao, Zopper and Grofers, who only cater to sell products from local stores, the local retailers might actually breathe a sigh of relief in this ever growing battle of e-commerce.
A leading industry expert says “Retailers have to make clear and strategic responses to the changing pattern of how consumers shop, which includes tactical decisions about store numbers and locations. They also need to fully integrate these physical stores with their websites, smart phone offerings and social media community coherently.”
