How India shops on mobile (Infographic)

The author of this article is InMobi’s head of marketing for India and Southeast Asia.

Photo credit: Pexels.

Nature follows patterns, so do humans. Indians specifically, have a set pattern they follow even while shopping. Reaching more than a billion mobile users across the globe, InMobi has a unique window into user behavior.

At a time where there is a shift from supermarkets and mom and pop stores – called kiranawalas in India – to etailers, we observed that there is a systematic approach to shopping on mobile, followed by Indians.

India is high on life specifically during weekends. A major chunk of Indians shop on a Saturday. Night owls form a huge subset and contribute to maximum sales. There might be a specific day and time to shop, but do they follow a process before finally buying? Or can we persuade them towards purchasing sooner?

Persuasion seems to work rather visually with the multicultural people of India. If they are shown visuals of the product that they viewed or links to their checkout carts, then window shopping seems to result in purchase. The checkout of the product in cart seems to only take maximum of one hour when the shopper gets to view the product again.

Clearly, there are two crucial insights for mobile and retailers,

• Seeing is Buying – shoppers are more likely to buy if they see things they like. It makes common sense. So the more a retailer can help their users discover relevant products, the more likely they are to go on to purchase them.
• Remarketing wins shoppers back – retargeting shoppers who signaled their interest but then abandoned their carts or got distracted helps bring them back into the purchase journey and translates to higher sales.