Rural to urban migration in India is a common practice, mainly for better education and employment opportunities. But when it comes to ecommerce, there is an anti-clockwise migration where digital companies are moving from urban to rural terrain.
Experts approve of this trend as they feel exploring remote towns and villages is the right path to growth. The popular sentiment is ‘think rural before going global’ should be digital start-up’s main goal.
Radhika Aggarwal, co-founder of online marketplace Shopclues asserted, “We haven’t even scratched the surface yet in India. We’re very focused on getting into rural India and there are multiple things Indian companies can do before they start looking abroad.”
Top etailers are already doing their bit
After smelling huge potential, ecommerce biggies Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Shopclues and Paytm have already moved on to tier 2 & 3 cities, small towns and villages.
Low returns rate in the rural market is a big relief for etailers. Not to forget online orders from small towns has only gone up in the past few years.
How are they managing to do it? By:
- Partnering with rural ecommerce start-ups for delivery assistance
- Embracing assisted ecommerce
- Making most of government initiatives
- Introducing regional language websites
- Building offline stores in rural market
Barely a drop in the ocean
India’s online buyer base is very low compared to other ecommerce markets across the world. This is why our online industry is still termed as ‘at the nascent stage’ and has a long way to go before it hits the maturity stage.
Once the kinks such as bad internet connectivity, low penetration of digital payments, complicated logistics network, delivery nightmares, and ambiguous legal framework is ironed out, rural market will be a goldmine of ecommerce opportunities.
No comments:
Post a Comment