Graphic: The state of Indian ecommerce in 2017

China and the US may be the biggest markets for ecommerce, but ignore India at your own peril, as it is the fastest growing market for the sector.

In this infographic, we at Metisa compared a few of the largest ecommerce sites in India in terms of traffic, engagement metrics, and major customer acquisition and retention channels. The goal was to compare these players transparently, independently, and neutrally and see what observations could be drawn. This analysis is based on traffic for the month of April 2017.

Data here came from an independent third-party source called SimilarWeb. They combine several sources of data including local internet service providers, monitored devices, web crawlers, and direct measurement sources to come up with estimates of traffic data, time on site, bounce rate, and other metrics.

Some observations

Who are the biggest players?

• The largest players sell a wide variety of products and are not limited to one product category. This trend is consistent with markets like North America and Southeast Asia where the largest players are marketplaces.
• Amazon India and Flipkart are the market leaders with significantly more page views than other players in India’s ecommerce market. This is consistent with similar economies of scale that can be observed in the North American and Southeast Asian markets.

Who has the best customer engagement?

• Amazon India and Myntra are leaders in web and mobile web engagement.
• Larger players like Amazon India, Flipkart, Paytm, MakeMyTrip, and Snapdeal tend to attract customers to spend more minutes on site.

How are they acquiring customers?

• Companies usually receive a large proportion of their traffic directly or from search engines.
• Some companies like Flipkart, Jabong, and Koovs make more use of display ads.
• Most sites receive approximately 10 percent of traffic from referrals.
• Mail accounts for a small proportion of traffic across ecommerce sites in India. This could be an area of opportunity for sites to boost web traffic.
• Success in driving traffic from social media widely differs.

We hope you have found this infographic useful in understanding more about the Indian ecommerce landscape. We’d love to chat if you have any feedback or interesting insights to add about the topic.