Highly successful eCommerce in rural India

In rural India internet usage is turbocharged by lower data prices,  ecommerce growth is now the fastest outside India’s eight tier one cities, and industry rivals like Amazon which has committed over £5bnand local rivals are competing fiercely for a new wave of customers.

Young entrepreneur Ananda Mishra founded his small ecommerce business Grozip in 2016 in Bhubaneswar  catering over 1m people in eastern India. With the advent of Reliance JIO’s free internet to rural areas and lower price of mobile phones, ecommerce is one of the fastest growing business provisional towns and villages. Mr Mishra said “now people are leaving Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi to join us, because they can see we are growing at an exponential rate”.

In another program Amazon is piggybacking on local shopkeepers benefiting from local logistical knowledge and trusted status in their communities.  Amazon Easy a new brand for small retailers  in mid-sized towns and help customers to make their first online purchases using their mobile phones in their shops. Amazon also offers them the option of paying in cash upon delivery, despite the resultant costs of  cash management. Amazon want to circle lower-income Indians into its customer base and with that in mind they have launched Micron, a stripped-down version of its mobile app with fewer features and lower memory usage which can be easily used in low-cost handsets with small memory.

Their Hindi version of its platform, with details of thousands of products translated by a team of linguists. Their rival Snapdeal make 85 per cent of its sales outside the largest cities, who are offering scratch cards and spinning wheels that offer prizes.

Mukesh Ambani’s JIo would work with small offline shopkeepers and sister company Reliance Retail the country’s biggest formal retailer.

In the meanwhile, Flipkart which was bought by Walmart for $16bn last year is concentrating on fashion.