Small towns are buzzing with e-shoppers

Small-town India is buying with a mouse, nowadays. Its share of India’s online shopping is more than a nibble. Take Ratnavel Punnuswamy, who’s a regular on retail websites. He spends large amounts every month on books, films and music, rail and air tickets, and recently, he even picked up a camera. He orders gifts for friends, and usually surfs travel websites before planning a vacation. Till a few years ago, Punnuswamy’s shopping methods would have made him an oddity in his hometown — Coimbatore.

Not anymore. The college lecturer, who recently got a broadband connection, knows many people who shop over the internet. “We get to know about the latest products in the market, but not all of them come to a store near us. But we’re sure to find them online.”

Shopping on the net has suddenly become big in small towns. “While Delhi, Mumbai and other metros are holding steady, customers from Class B and C cities make up about 50 per cent of our online base today,” says Faisal Farooqui, CEO of Mouthshut.com. “This is up about 90-120 per cent from 2006.” On some weekends, the website registers more visitors from Mangalore and Surat than from Kolkata.

According to Sanjay Tiwari, who heads the research group JuxtConsult, two out of three online consumers are from non-metro centres in India. “There are 25.17 million internet users in India of which about 17-18 million (approx 67 per cent) are from ‘urban uptowns’, or smaller centres,” he says. “They make up 37 per cent of buyer base.”

At Indiaplaza.com, about 350-400 orders of the 1,000 sales that are processed every day are from smaller towns.

It’s clear residents in India’s towns are buying with aplomb — and putting down as much money for as many goods as their counterparts in larger cities. Traffic generated on Mouthshut.com — and this includes reviews and online discussions on products — shows high-end mobile phones are the bestsellers.

More people are also writing in for information about best restaurants and malls near them and, surprisingly, the best weekend getaways near their hometown — all indices of prosperous, aspirant families. “When you have money, the first thing you want to do is take your family out for a meal or go for a quick holiday,” says Farooqui.

People also seek information about deals on cars and two-wheelers. Chandigarh-based writer Arun Soni recently bought his Wagon R after extensive discussion on the net with complete strangers. “My online buying was restricted to train and movie tickets,” he says. “This was the first time I bought something expensive after feedback from the internet, and I’m happy with my purchase. My wife, who also surfs online stores, did not need much convincing either.”

Other sites report a profusion of queries and orders for computer software and accessories; electronic gadgets like MP3 players, iPods, cameras and DVD players; apparel and a host of gifts, from flowers and cakes, to books, music and films. The patterns reflect not only affluence, but also a fairly evolved process of purchase-one that involves choices made after considerable discussion and weighing of merits online.

It would be simplistic to assume that only greater internet penetration has led to this surge in online shopping in non-metro areas, says K Vaitheeswaran, of Indiaplaza.com. An Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) report on the internet presence in India shows net usage in small towns has gone up from 27 per cent in 2001, to 39 per cent in 2006. “With more employment in the towns, there is also more disposable income in the hands of residents,” says Farooqui. “And since they can’t always find what they want at a local store, they turn to the internet.”

Net-enabling-through better electricity supply or improved phone connections for broadband—have also helped. Tennyson Thomas, an MBA student who lives in a town 20 miles outside Cochin, feels service providers like BSNL and MTNL have certainly made an effort to reach out to smaller towns. “They no longer discriminate between services in, say, Delhi and Indore, which is good for us,” he says. In fact, Vaitheeswaran believes it’s less about an emerging, tech-savvy class of people in the towns adapting to the intricacies of using the internet, and more about a gap between demand and supply. “The demand was always there, but we couldn’t provide the services earlier,” he says. And while most online consumers are comfortable in English, many who write to Mouthshut.com send orders in Hindi, written out in the Roman Script.

Subho Ray, president of the IAMAI, however, cautions against being overly-enthusiastic about this growing trend. For him, it’s just a matter of time before stores catch up with online buying, putting the latter out of business. “For instance, I don’t think people in small towns will want to buy their groceries online,” he says. “For online shopping to become a habit, there has to be some value-addition other than just the convenience of buying. Online retailers will have to guarantee either the best and cheapest products, or good customer service, neither of which they can offer right now.”

The biggest uncertainty, according to Ray, comes from the fact that no one — not retailers, customers nor portals — know how the story will unfold. “They’re all waiting to see this before they make any improvements, which may not be the best thing for the future of online shopping,” he adds.

But till then, there’s no denying that India’s towns are breaking the stereotypes, and shopping their hearts out.