An Empirical Study to Find the Road-map for Understanding Online Buying Practices of Indian Youths

1. Introduction

The current scenario of the digital world is presenting great opportunities for the marketers to reach the more number of consumer at a faster way with improved economic benefits. Digital marketing has proved to be a boom for the E-retailing companies, the reason being more user friendliness of business, the space for innovation and the scope for better interaction between the seller and the customer. The market scenario is changing at a fast rate, the result of which is that the new age customers are more inclined towards the online buying rather than shopping in the brick and mortar stores. According to UCLA Centre for Communication Policy (2001), online shopping is the fourth most popular activity on Internet, right after e-mail usage or instant messaging activity, web search and getting online news. If we consider the case of Amazon.com, then it can be observed that it has sold 36.8 million items in 2013 which is significantly 38.9% higher than the previous year, with a record-breaking achievement of about 426 products sold per second during Christmas 2013. As per the statistics revealed by TRAI (Telecom regulatory Authority of India, Report, March 2013), internet users in India has crossed 164.8 million in the year 2013 which is presently the third-largest in the world; the growth being 31% over a year’s time.

The advantage of online buying is that there is a wide scope for a customer to choose amongst the different variety of products that can be seen and compared with other products in the category. Buying patterns of the modern consumers has changed massively in the era of internet (Varadarajan and Yadav, 2002). In Indian context, online buying is a newer trend as compared to the countries in the west and thus the growth of online shoppers is tremendous. The growing importance & popularity of online buying is very much substantial & quite evident in India these days. The concept of online buying has put the variety of products on a single platform, thus creating a virtual hypermarket where an online user can choose and buy the products at that very instant without any hassles.