What the Future Holds for Online Grocery Shopping in India

The Significance of the Online Grocer

For the general Indians, especially the ones who live in metro cities and their tier 1 or 2 counterparts, online grocery store have taken an important place of the lives. Gone are the days when one used to wait for the hawker to bring vegetables on a cart for us to buy. The option was limiting and so was the possibility to ensure a continuous dose essential vitamins and minerals for our body!

Those days are also gone when we had to wait for the corner shop guy and remain at his mercy to pay attention to us among the crowd of many. Shopping for grocery was a pain to say the least. More so if there working individual of a family was entrusted with the responsibility shopping household and grocery items for the family on a regular basis.

Even those days seem to be fast receding when we would need to drive to the other end of town, find a place to park our vehicles, jostle with one another while making purchases and at the end of the exercise queue up to pay at the counter. Today when you buy grocery online you do it from the comfort of your home while sitting on your favourite chair. There is no driving, no jostling and no queuing or even lifting heavy bags laden with groceries. But, the big question is whether online grocery shopping is here to stay.

The Future of Online Grocery Shopping

To answer the question whether there is any future of online grocery shopping in India all you need to do is to read what the Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said recently. According to the person who should know, e-commerce is all set to grow at between 10-15% annually. He also said that the government is going to streamline and digitise e-commerce transactions so that the flow of goods is easier. “The whole logistics infrastructure, because of e-commerce, is going to change” he said. Even as per the study by Assocham-Deloitte, the e-commerce industry is all set to cross business worth USD 16 Billion by this year end. The growth of the digital commerce market in India has been from USD 4.4 billion in the year 2010 to USD 13.6 billion in 2014, more than three times in just four years.

The Role of the Virtual Grocer

The online grocer is definitely here to stay. This is because groceries will need to sell irrespective of the state the economy is in. Now, if the economy is improving, can the sale of groceries show a downward trend? The state of commuting being what it is now with all our roads getting choked, the consumer will totally stop going out once he finds that online grocery shopping has no hassles at all. The other scene that is unfolding is that the customer base is steadily increasing thanks to the increase in the penetration of the Internet connectivity, made even simpler due to the new generation of smart phones. From the point of view of the entrepreneur also the activity of e-commerce is cheap since the cost of owning a domain and hosting the online store is negligible when one compares these costs with the cost incurred in investing in physical infrastructure.

The online grocer in India is here to stay. You can expect further improvements in the way this business is transacted with the customer being the winner for a change.