Factors Influencing Online Shopping During Diwali Festival 2014: Case Study of Flipkart and Amazon.In

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Indian retail sector is witnessing a dramatic change because of changing mindset of the urban consumers. These consumers are spoilt for choices and are presented not only with different products and brands but also with diverse retailer formats such as departmental stores, specialty stores, and online shopping platforms. The prospect of online shopping is increasing in India because of many factors such as increased Internet literacy, perceived usefulness, ease of use, increased number of working women, entry from the global and local participants, and the increased visibility of online players, to name a few. E-tailing is the process of selling retail goods using the internet. The Indian e-tailing sector has matured enough to deal with the rapid transformations from the era of offline to online platform to be used by the consumers and addresses the challenges faced in this process. The paper examines the growth and opportunities in the Indian e-tailing sector by focusing on the current and future wave of the two big giant e-tailers in India, namely Flipkart and Amazon.in. The purpose of this research is to understand the positive and negative factors influencing the online shopping in India during the festive season. It also aims to explore the role of online shopping festival in driving the shopping explosion from consumer's perspective. The study is basically to understand the strategies adopted by Flipkart and Amazon.in to capitalize on the festive season 2014 to keep their consumers captivated and thereby increase their profits dramatically. KEYWORDS: E-tailing, Flipkart, Amazon.in, Diwali festive season, Strategies, online platform, consumer's perception. INTRODUCTION Thus in the future, instead of buying bananas in a grocery store, you could go pick them off a tree in a virtual jungle. - Yasuhiro Fukushima, founder, Enix When the internet first came into public use, it was hailed as liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. And then it was hijacked, first by advertising and then by commerce. Internet is rapidly becoming the main platform of communication and convenience of doing business. It has transformed the majority's everyday social and professional lives (Evans & Wurster, 1997) by becoming an integral part of their day to day lives be it for networking, sharing experiences, chatting, online purchases, making online investments, making payments or for banking online. In the era of globalization, the Internet is being used by the consumer to provide not only the global reach with ease of access but also to enhance interaction, and to communicate effectively in a cost efficient manner (Pyle, 1996; Jones & Visayasarthy, 1998). It enhances multiple other activities like collecting market research data, promoting services, increasing visibility, and handling supply chain to promote an extremely rich and flexible new retail channel (Doherty & Ellis-Chadwick, 1999). The impact of the Internet revolution greatly affected on businesses and the society due to which its usage has increased multifold over the past few years in India. According to an Indian online landscape study (Juxt, 2010), the number of active Internet users in India stands at 65 million, recording a 28% rise from 51 million last year. The study also revealed that India has 61 million 'regular' users with 46 million urban and 16 million rural users. E-tailing is a subset of e-commerce, which encapsulates all commerce conducted via the Internet (Turban, 2007). It includes sale of product and merchandise and does not include sale of services viz. railway tickets, airlines tickets, job portals, etc. Slowly the concept of e-tail alternatives is evolving in larger numbers across the globe. E-tailing becomes a viable business model when it efficiently generates demand, sources various products and goods from vendors, and delivers effectively them to the end consumers. …