2015 was a great year for the Indian Ecommerce sector as it grew from $5 billion to $8 billion. The market also welcomed a significant number of online shoppers out of which, majority of the traffic is that comprising mobile audience. Thus, m-commerce is also gaining popularity along with ecommerce.

The year was full of new trends catching-up and old ones dying an untimely death. Here are 7 key trends the Indian Ecommerce Industry witnessed in 2016:

Trend #1: Dipping discounts

Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon India, eBay.in, Paytm and Shopclues are the top six ecommerce players of India who jointly drive almost 85% Business of the country’s Ecommerce Industry. In the current year, these Companies would go after profitable growth instead of attracting customers with huge discounts. Because providing high discounts ultimately drags majority of the companies towards losses!

Trend #2: The Rural Pitch

Ecommerce companies would emphasize more on attracting the customers from rural areas. Along with this, traditional business houses such as Tata Group and Reliance Industries will enter more aggressively into the ecommerce business.

Trend #3: The Smartphone Saga

As stated by Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google – South East Asia and India, “There were 50 million transacting users in 2015. This year it will be at least 75 million.” According to him, majority of the traffic comprises customers using smartphone devices. However, users browse products on desktops or laptops, they prefer transacting via smartphones because of their faster linkages to payment gateways.

Trend #4: Convenient Product Buying

Due to addition in the number of customers, the companies would be busy in serving them every possible thing in every possible way. This would encourage the companies to add some new product categories. Mr. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the Founder of Paytm, believes that even milk and water will be delivered by the companies to their customers and this would replace the neighborhood store.

Trend #5: COD in trouble

Cash on Delivery has been one of the most preferred payment options for the customers. But as more and more people are getting familiar with payment wallets for shopping and paying bills, the craze of COD is also going to reduce.

We hope that in 2016, more companies join ecommerce business than the last year and continue to strengthen the Indian economy. Trends come and go, but ecommerce transactions and business would never become obsolete.