Evolution of The Indian Consumer

In one of our previous post, we touched upon the fact that Indian e-commerce has grown tremendously in recent years and digital payments form the core of the Digital India ecosystem. The growth in payments has been driven by the push for online payments at the institutional level, be it government, corporate or banks.

Having said that, the paradigm shift from offline to online has been driven by the Indian Consumer, who has accepted the digital medium. Specifically, in the space of digital payments, the consumer has been forced to reduce his dependency on cash, given the government’s huge demonetization drive last November. Therefore, it would be fair to say that some of the digital adoption in the Indian context has been due to demonetization, especially in the payments space.

Until a year ago, the penetration of Digital Payments in India was rather low. However, owing to the government’s efforts, there has been an explosion in the digital payments space in India. Post demonetization, the number of debit card transactions swore to 1 Billion*. Well, most of these transactions have been PoS(Point of Sale) transactions in physical stores. But a significant number of those transactions have been done online as well and payments have been made in online rather than Cash on Delivery.

As per Industry body, ASSOCHAM, the Indian e-commerce consumer size will most likely cross 100 Million in 2017 and will ride on a 65% growth rate(y-o-y) in 2018. The evolution of the Indian Consumer has been pretty rapid in terms of consumption patterns. The shift from offline to online and from COD (Cash on Delivery) to Online Payment has been rather rapid.

Talking of shifts in preferred mode of payment from Cash on Delivery to Online has been rather ironical, because the growth of Indian e-commerce has been because of the Cash on Delivery model. But, owing to demonetization, the rise in online payments is driving e-commerce growth and will continue to do so, in coming years. This goes to show a significant change in attitude and purchasing habit of the Indian Consumer.

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*Source: The Economic Times